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ANNA KARENINA 


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LIFE 



COUNT LYOF N., TOLSTOI 

A- 



AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION 
BY 

ISABEL F. HAPGOOD 




NEW YORK 
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

13 Astor Place 



.Is? 



Copyright, 1888, by 
Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 



/*- zfy 




Electrotyped by 
C. J. Peters and Son, Boston. 



LIFE. 



" Man is only a seed, the feeblest in nature ; but he is a thinking 
seed. The whole universe must not rise in arms to crush him. 
A vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But, if the entire 
universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than 
that which slays him, because he knows that he is dying; and of 
the advantage which the universe possesses over him the universe 
knows nothing. Thus all our dignity consists in thought. It is 
that upon which we must take our stand, not upon space and 
duration. Let us, then, labor to think well ; that is the principle 
of morals." — PASCAL. 

" Two things fill my spirit with ever fresh and increasing wonder 
and awe, the oftener and the more steadfastly my thoughts occupy 
themselves therewith, — the starry heavens above me and the 
moral law within me. . . . The first begins from the place which I 
occupy in the outer world of sense, and extends the connection in 
which I stand to invisible space beyond the eye of man, with 
worlds on worlds, systems on systems, to their periodical move- 
ments in endless time, their beginning and continuance. The 
second begins with my unseen self, my personality, and places me 
in a world which has true eternity, but which is perceptible only 
to the understanding, and with which I am conscious of being, 
not, as in the former case, accidental, but in universal and indis- 
pensable connection." — Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, Con- 
clusion). 

"A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one 
another." — Gospel of John, xiii. 34. 

3 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter Page 

Introduction 7 

I. The Fundamental Contradiction of Human Life .... 31 
II. The Sole Aim of Life. ' 37 

III. The Error of the Scribes 45 

IV. The Teaching of the Wise Men, under the Idea of the 

Whole Life of Man presents the Visible Phenomena of 
his Animal Existence, and from them draws Deductions 

as to the Aim of his Life .... 49 

V. The False Doctrines of the Scribes and Pharisees give 

neither Explanations of the Meaning of Real Life, nor 

Guidance for it ; the Sole Guide for Life appears as the 

Inertia of Life, which has no Rational Explanation . . 55 

VI. Division of Consciousness in the Men of our World ... 65 

VII. The Partition of Sense arises from the Blending of the 

Life of the Animal with the Life of Man . . ... 71 
VIII. There is no Division and Contradiction : it only so appears 

through False Doctrine . 77 

IX. The Birth of True Life in Man 82 

X. Reason is the Acknowledgment by Man of the Laws ac- 
cording to which his Life must be Accomplished ... 86 

XL The False Doctrine of Learning 90 

XII. The Cause of False Knowledge is the false Perspective in 

which Objects present themselves 98 

XIII. The Recognizability of Objects is Augmented not accord- 

ing to their Manifestation in Space and Time, but accord- 
ing to the Unity of the Law whereto we and those 
Subjects which we study are subservient 105 

XIV. The True Life of Man is not that which takes place in 

Space and Time 113 

XV. The Renunciation of Happiness on the part of the Animal 

Personality is the Law of Man's Life 121 

XVI. The Animal Personality is the Instrument. of Life ... 127 

XVII. Birth in the Spirit 132 

XVIII. The Demands of Rational Consciousness 135 

XIX. The Demands of the Individual appear Incompatible with 

the Demands of Rational Consciousness 14S 

5 



CONTENTS. 



XX. What is required is not Renunciation of Individuality, 

but its Subjection to Rational Consciousness .... 153 
XXI. The Feeling of Love is a Phenomenon of the Individual 
Activity brought into Subjection to Rational Con- 
sciousness f- 

XXII. The Manifestation of the Feeling of Love is Impossible for 

Men who do not understand the Meaning of their Life, 167 
XXIII. True Love is the result of the Renunciation of Personal 

YYm T ^PP^s . 180 

AXiV. Love is Love only when it is the Sacrifice of Self . . . 187 
XXV. Men's Efforts, directed to the Impossible Amelioration of 
their Existence, deprive them of the Possibility of the 

one True Life Ig ^ 

XXVI. The Fear of Death is only a Confession of the Unsolved 

Contradiction of Life 199 

XXVII. The Death of the Flesh annihilates the Body which 
belongs to Space and the Consciousness which belongs 
to Time, but it cannot annihilate that which consti- 
tutes the Foundation of Life : the Special Relation of 

Every Creature to the World 208 

XXVIII. The Fear of Death proceeds from the Fact that Men 
accept as Life one Small and Limited Portion of it 

with their own False Idea 219 

XXIX. Life is a Relation to the World. The Movement of Life 
is the Establishment of a New, Higher Relation, and, 
therefore, Death is the Entrance upon a New Relation . 225 
XXX. The Life of Dead Men is not Ended m this World . . 231 
XXXI. The Superstition of Death arises from this, that Man 

Confounds his Different Relations to the World . . . 241 
XXXII. The Visible Life is a Part of the Endless Movement of 

Life 249 

XXXIII. The Inexplicability of the Sufferings of the Earthly Exis- 

tence proves to Man more convincingly than any- 
thing else that his Life is not a Life of Personality, 
which began at his Birth and which ends at his Death . 258 

XXXIV. Bodily Sufferings constitute an Indispensable Condition 

of the Life and Happiness of Men 274 

Conclusion 283 

Appendix I. . . 2S5 

Appendix II 289 

Appendix III , 293 



INTRODUCTION. 



Let us picture to ourselves a man whose only 
means of livelihood is a mill. This man is the 
son and grandson of a miller, and knows thor- 
oughly, by tradition, how to deal with every part 
of the mill, so that it shall grind well. This man, 
though ignorant of mechanics, adjusts all the parts 
of the mill, as he understands it, so that the prod- 
uct may be profitable and good, and that men 
may live and eat. 

But it has chanced that this man has begun to 
reflect upon' the construction of the mill, to hear 
some confused statements about its mechanism, 
and he has begun to observe what part is turned 
by what other part. 

And, from the fly-wheel to the grindstone, from 
the grindstone to the mill-race, from the mill-race 
to the wheel, from the wheel to the gate, the dam, 
and the water, he has argued to the conclusion 
that he has clearly comprehended that the whole 

7 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

matter lies in the clam and the river. And the 
man has rejoiced so greatly in this discovery of his 
that instead of scrutinizing, as heretofore, the 
quality of the flour which comes forth, instead 
of raising and lowering the stones, of shoeing them, 
of tightening and slackening the belt, he has begun 
to study the river. And his mill has been thrown 
entirely out of gear. People have begun to tell 
the miller that he is not behaving rightly. Pie 
has disputed and continued to reason about the 
river. And he has worked so much, so very much 
over this, he has disputed so much and so hotly 
with those who have proved to him the falsity of 
his premises, that he has, at last, become con- 
vinced that the river is the mill itself. 

To every proof of the falsity of his course of 
reasoning, such a miller will reply : " No mill 
grinds without water. Consequently, in order to 
know the mill, it is requisite to know how to admit 
the water, to know the force of its current and 
whence it is derived ; hence, in order to know the 
mill, it is necessary to know the river." 

The miller cannot be logically controverted in 
his line of argument. The only means of dispel- 
ling his illusion lies in showing him that, in every 



% INTR OD UC TION. g 

course of reasoning, the reasoning itself, is not so 
important as the place occupied by the reasoning, 
i. e,, that, in orclei to meditate fruitfully, it is 
necessary to know upon what to meditate first, 
and what afterwards; to demonstrate to- him that 
sensible activity is distinguished from senseless 
activity only in this, that wise activity disposes 
its meditations in the order of their impor- 
tance, deciding which reasoning must come first, 
second, third, tenth, and so on. But senseless 
activity consists in reasoning without order. It 
must be demonstrated to him that the order of 
this arrangement is not accidental, but that it 
depends upon the object for which the reasoning 
is conducted. 

The object of all courses of reasoning deter- 
mines the order in which the. separate trains of 
thought must be arranged in order to be under- 
stood. 

And reasoning not bound together by a com- 
mon aim of all the arguments is foolish, no mat- 
ter how logical it may be. 

The aim of the miller consists in producing good 
flour, and this aim, if he will keep it in view, will 
determine for him the most unquestionable regu- 



IO INTRODUCTION-. 

larity and- order of sequence for his reasoning 
about the millstones, the wheel, the dam, and 
the river. 

But, without this relation to the aim of his 
reasoning, the miller's arguments, no matter how 
fine and logical they may be, will be inherently 
irregular, and, what is the principal consideration, 
vain ; they will be like the reasoning of Kifa 
Mokeevitch, 1 when he argued as to what should 
be the thickness of the shell of an elephant's egg, 
if elephants were produced from the egg, like 
birds. And such, in my opinion, are the argu- 
ments of our contemporary science about life. 

Life is the mill which man desires to investi- 
gate. The mill is required to grind well, life is 
necessary only in order that it may be good. 
And this branch of investigation man cannot 
abandon for a single moment with impunity. If 
he does abandon it, his deliberations infallibly lose 
their place, and become like the reasoning of 
Mokeevitch as to how much powder would be 
required to break the shell of an elephant's egg. 

Man studies life only in order that it may 

1 An incoherent reasoner, introduced in Part Second of Gogol's 
" Dead Souls." — Trans. 



INTRO D UCTION. j r " 

become better. In this manner those men study 
life who have advanced humanity in the path of 
knowledge. But, by the side of these true teach- 
ers and benefactors of humanity, there always 
have existed, and there exist now, reasoners 
who have abandoned the aim of reasoning, and 
who, in its stead, investigate the question as to 
the origin of life,- — as to why the mill turns. 
Some assert that it is by reason of the water; 
others, that it is in consequence of the arrange- 
ment. The dispute waxes hot, and the subject of 
discussion moves further and further away, and is 
completely replaced by utterly foreign topics. 

There is an ancient jest regarding the dispute of 
a Jew and a Christian. The story runs that the 
Christian, replying to the confused subtleties of 
the Jew, slapped the latter on his bald pate with 
his palm, so that it cracked, and put the question : 
"Did that come from the pate or the palm?" 
And the dispute about faith was replaced by a 
fresh and insoluble problem. 

Something of the same sort has been in prog- 
ress, since the most ancient times, by the side 
of men's true wisdom, and in connection with the 
question about life. 



1 2 INTR OD UCTIOiV. 

Discussions are known to have arisen in the 
most ancient times as to whence comes life? 
from an immaterial beginning, or from the com- 
bination of various materials ? And these discus- 
sions continue at the present day, so that no end 
to them can be foreseen, because the aim of all 
discussion has been abandoned and life is reasoned 
upon apart from its aim. And by the word 
life — life itself is not understood, but that 
from which it proceeds, or that which accom- 
panies it. 

Now, not only in scientific books, but even in 
conversation, when life is mentioned, the discus- 
sion is not about what we all know, — about 
life ; about those sufferings which I fear and 
which I hate, and those joys and pleasures which 
I desire ; but of something which came into exist- 
ence, perhaps, through the play of chance accord- 
ing to some physical laws, and, perhaps, because 
it possesses in itself some secret cause. 

The word "life" is ascribed to something con- 
testable, which does not contain within itself the 
chief signs of life : the consciousness of suffering 
and of enjoyment, and of aspirations towards 
goodness. 



A T TR OD UC TWIST. J 3 

" La vie est 1'ensemble des fonctions, qui re- 
siste a. la mort. La vie est 1'ensemble des 
phenomenes, qui se succedent pendant un temps 
limite dans un etre organise." Life is the sum 
total of the functions which resist death. Life is 
the sum total of the phenomena which follow 
each other in the course of a limited time in an 
organic being". 

Setting aside the inaccuracy, the tautology, 
with which these definitions are filled, the sub- 
stance of them all is identical, namely, — that 
which all men in common understand incontest- 
able* by the word "life" is not defined by them, 
but some processes or other which accompany 
life and other phenomena. 

Under the majority of these heads comes the 
activity of the crystal in process of formation ; 
under "some comes the activity of abandonment, 
decomposition, and under all comes the life of 
each separate cell in my body, for which there 
exists nothing that is either good or bad. Some 
of the processes going on in the crystal, in the 
protoplasm, in the germ of the protoplasm, in 
the cells of my body and of other bodies, are 
called by a word which is indissolubly connected 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

in me with the consciousness of an aspiration 
towards my welfare. 

Arguments upon some of the conditions of life, 
as life itself, are precisely the same as the argu- 
ment about the river, as the actual mill. These 
arguments are, possibly, very necessary for some 
purpose or other. But they do not touch the 
subject which they intend to discuss. And, there- 
fore, all deductions as to life drawn from such 
arguments cannot fail to be deceptive. 

The word "life" is very short and very clear, 
and every one understands what it signifies, and 
we are bound always to employ it in that sense 
which is comprehensible to all. Surely this word 
is comprehensible to every one, not because it is 
very accurately defined by other words and ideas, 
but, on the contrary, because this word expresses 
a fundamental idea, from which are deduced many, 
if not all other ideas, and therefore, in order to 
make deductions from this idea, we are bound, 
first of all, to accept that idea in its central sig- 
nification, which is incontrovertible by all. And 
this, it seems to me, has been neglected by the 
contending parties, in connection with the idea of 
life. It has come to pass that the fundamental 



INTRODUCTION. 



15 



idea of life, taken at first, not in its central signifi- 
cance, in consequence of disputes about it, and 
departing ever more and more from its funda- 
mental meaning, accepted by every one, has finally 
lost the thought upon which it is based, and has 
received another meaning, which does not corre- 
spond to it. This has come to pass, that the very 
centre from which the figure was drawn has been 
deserted and carried to another point. Men dis- 
pute over the question, whether life lies in the cell 
or in the protoplasm, or, still lower, in inorganic 
matter. 

But, before disputing, we should ask ourselves, 
have we a right to attribute a comprehension of 
life to a cell ? 

We say, for instance, that there is life in the 
cell, that the cell is the living being. But the 
fundamental idea of human life and the idea 
of life which is contained in the cell are two 
ideas which are not only utterly different, but 
which cannot be united. One idea excludes the 
other. I discover that the whole of my body, 
without exception, consists of cells. These cells, 
I am informed, possess the same sort of life as 
myself, and are precisely such living beings as 



l6 INTRODUCTION. 

myself, but I acknowledge that I am alive only 
because I am conscious that I, with all the cells 
which constitute me, am one living, indivisible 
being. But I am informed that the whole of me, 
without exception, is composed of living cells. 
To whom am I to attribute the property of life, 
to the cells or to myself ? If I admit that the 
cells have life, then, from the idea of life, I must 
obtain the chief indication of my life, the con- 
sciousness that I am a single, living being ; but 
if I do not admit that I have life as an indepen- 
dent being, then it is evident that I can by no 
means attribute that property to the cells of 
which my body is composed, and of whose con- 
sciousness I know nothing. 

Either I am alive, and there are portions of me 
which are not alive, called cells, or there exists a 
throng of living cells, and my consciousness of 
life is not life, but merely an illusion. 

For we do not say that there is in the cells 
anything that we call bryzn, but we say that 
there is life. We say " life " because by this 
word we understand not some indefinite x, but a 
thoroughly well defined dimension, which we all 
alike know, and know only of ourselves as a con- 



iAtrod UCTION. ! j 

sciousness of our own unit of body, indivisible 
with itself, and hence such an idea is inapplica- 
ble to those cells of which my body is com- 
posed. 

In whatever investigations or observations a 
man engages, he is bound by every word to 
mean that which all indisputably understand 
alike, and not some idea or other which is neces- 
sary to him, but wholly incompatible with its 
fundamental meaning, comprehensible to all. 

If the word "life" can be used so that it desisf- 
nates, indifferently, both the property of an object 
and entirely different properties of all its compo- 
nent parts, as is done in the case of the cell and 
the animal composed of cells, then other words 
may also be employed in the same way. We may 
say, for example, that, as all words are composed 
of letters, and letters are made up of lines, the 
drawing of lines is the same as the exposition of 
thoughts, and that, therefore, lines may be called 
thoughts. 

The most ordinary phenomenon in the scientific 
world is to hear and to read discussions upon the 
origin of life from the play of physical, mechanical 
powers. 



1 8 INTR OB UC T/OAT. 

But it is doubtful if the majority of the scien- 
tific people hold to this — I find it difficult to 
express it — opinion which is not an opinion, this 
paradox which is not a paradox, but rather a jest 
or a riddle. 

It asserts that life proceeds from the play of 
physical and mechanical forces, of those physical 
forces which we have called physical and mechan- 
ical merely in contradistinction to the idea of life. 

It is evident that the word "life," improperly 
applied to ideas which are foreign to it, departing 
further and further from its fundamental signifi- 
cation, has abandoned its centre to such a degree 
that life is already assumed to be where, accord- 
ing to our conceptions, life cannot exist. The 
assumption is similar to that of a circle or sphere 
whose centre should lie outside of its periphery. 

In fact, life, which I cannot imagine as other- 
wise than as a striving from evil towards good, 
proceeds from those regions where I can discern 
neither good nor evil. It is evident that the 
centre of the conception of life has been entirely 
shifted. Moreover, following up the investiga- 
tions into that something called life, I even see 
that these investigations touch hardly any of the 



I 

INTROD UCTION. 



19 



ideas with which I am acquainted. I perceive an 
entire series of new ideas, and of words which 
possess a conventional meaning in the scientific 
jargon, but which have nothing in common with 
existing ideas. 

The idea of life which is familiar to me is not 
understood as every one understands it, and the 
ideas deduced from, it do not accord with the 
usual ideas, but present themselves as new, con- 
ventional conceptions, having received manufact- 
ured names to correspond. 

The human language is becoming more and 
more supplanted in scientific investigations, and, 
1 instead of words, the means of expression of exist- 
ing objects and ideas, a scientific volapiik reigns, 
distinguished from the real volapiik only in this, 
that the real volapiik calls existing objects and 
ideas by universal words, but the scientific vo- 
lapiik calls, by words which do not exist, ideas 
which do not exist. 

The sole means of mental communication be- 
tween men is the word, and, in order that this 
communication may be possible, it is necessary 
so to employ words that every word shall infalli- 
bly evoke, in all, corresponding and accurate ideas. 



2o INTRODUCTION. 

But if it be possible to use words at random, and 
by those words to understand whatever occurs to 
us, it is better not to speak, but to indicate every- 
thing by signs. 

I admit that to settle the laws of the world 
from the deductions of the mind alone, without 
experience or observation, is a false and unscien- 
tific course — that is to say, it cannot afford true 
knowledge; but will it not be still worse to study 
the phenomena of the world by experiments and 
observations, and at the same time be guided in 
these experiments and observations by ideas 
which are not fundamental and common to all 
men, but conventional, and to describe the re- 
sults of these experiments in words to which a 
varying significance can be attached ? The best 
apothecary's shop is productive of the greatest 
injury if the labels are pasted on the bottles, not 
according to their contents, but to suit the con- 
venience of the apothecary. 

But men say to me : " Science does not set 
itself the task of examining all the combinations 
of life (including within it, will, the desire for 
good, and the spiritual world) ; it makes only an 
abstract from the ideas of life of those apparitions 



I&TR OD UC TIOJV. 



21 



which are subject to its experimental investiga- 
tions. 

This would be very good and lawful. But we 
know that this is not at all the case in the repre- 
sentations of the scientific men of our times. If, 
first of all, the idea of life were admitted in its 
central significance, in that in which all under- 
stand it, it would afterwards be clearly settled 
that science, having made from this idea an ab- 
straction of all its sides, except of the one subject 
to external observation, looks upon the phenom- 
ena from that side only, for which it has its own 
peculiar methods of investigation, and it would all 
be very well, and it would have been quite an- 
other thing ; then the place which science would 
have occupied, and the results to which we should 
have arrived on the foundation of science, would 
have been entirely different. That which is must 
be said, and we must not conceal that which we 
all know. Do we not know that the majority of 
experimental scientific investigators are fully con- 
vinced that they are studying not one side only of 
life, but all life ? 

Astronomy, mechanics, physics, chemistry, and 
all the other sciences together, and separately, 



2 2 INTR OD UC TION. 

work over the side of life appertaining to each, 
without coming to any results as to life in general. 
Only during the period of their savagery, that is 
to say, of their indistinctness, their ill-defined 
state, did some of these sciences endeavor from 
their own point of view to grasp all the phenomena 
of life, and became confused, through inventing for 
themselves new ideas and new words. Thus it 
was with astronomy when it was astrology, thus it 
was with chemistry when it was alchemy. The 
same thing now takes place with that experimen- 
tal science of evolution, which, surveying one side 
or several sides of life, brings forward a claim to 
the study of all life. 

Men with such a false view of science by no 
means wish to admit that only a few sides of life 
are subject to their investigation, but they affirm 
that all life, with all its phenomena, will be studied 
by them, by the path of external experiment. 
" If," say they, " psycliics" (they are fond of this 
indefinite word of their volapiik) "are still unknown 
to us, they will yet be known to us. By following 
up one side or several sides of the phenomena of 
life, we shall learn to know all sides. That is to 
say, in other words, that, if we gaze very long and 



INTRODUCTION. 2 $ 

earnestly upon an object from one side, we shall 
see the object from all sides, and even from its 
interior. 

Amazing as is so strange a doctrine, — explicable 
only by the fanaticism of superstition, — it does 
exist, and, like every whimsical, fanatical doctrine, 
it produces its destructive effect, directing the 
activity of human thought in a false and frivolous 
path. Conscientious toilers perish, having conse- 
crated their lives to the study of an almost utterly 
worthless thing. The material forces of people 
perish, from being turned in a direction which is 
useless. The young generations perish, being 
directed to the same idle activity as Kifa Mokee- 
vitch, erected into the rank of the highest service 
to humanity. 

It is generally said : science studies life from all 
sides. And here lies the point, that every subject 
has as many sides as there are radii in a sphere, 
that is to say, they are innumerable, and it is 
impossible to study from all sides, but one must 
know from which side it is most important and 
necessary, and from which it is less important and 
less useful. As it is impossible to approach an 
object from all sides at once, so it is impossible to 



24 INTRODUCTION. 

study the phenomena of life from all sides and at 
once. And, willy-nilly, an order of succession is 
established. And herein lies the gist of the mat- 
ter. But this order of succession is furnished only 
by an understanding of life. 

Only a right understanding of life imparts the 
proper significance and direction to science in 
general, and to each science in particular, regu- 
lating them according to the importance of their 
significance in connection with life. But if the 
understanding of life is not such as is implanted 
within all of us, then science itself will be erro- 
neous. 

Not what we call science determines life, but 
our idea of life determines what science should 
acknowledge. And therefore, in order that sci- 
ence may be science, the question must first be 
settled as to what is and what is not science, and 
to this end our idea of life must be elucidated. 
I will express the whole of my thought frankly ; 
we all know the fundamental dogma of faith of 
this false experimental science. Matter and its 
energy exist ! Energy moves ; mechanical move- 
ment is converted into molecular ; molecular move- 
ment is expressed by heat, electricity, nervous, and 



* ikTR OD UC TION. 2 5 

brain movement. And all the phenomena of life, 
without exception, present themselves as relations 
of energy. Everything is thus beautiful, simple, 
clear, and, chief of all, convenient. So that, if 
there is nothing of all that which we so much 
desire, and which so simplifies our life, then all 
this must be invented in some manner or other. 

And here is the whole of my audacious 
thought : the chief portion of the energy, zeal, and 
activity of experimental science is founded on the 
desire to invent everything that is necessary for 
the firm establishment of so comfortable a repre- 
sentation. 

In all the activity of this science one beholds, 
not so much a desire to investigate the phenomena 
of life as the one ever-present anxiety to prove the 
veracity of its fundamental tenet, that force is 
wasted on experiments to explain the origin of 
organic from inorganic and psychical activity from 
the processes of organism. The organic does not 
pass into the inorganic ; let us seek at the bottom 
of the sea, we shall find a bit of stuff, which we 
will call the kernel, a monera. 

And it is not there ; we shall believe that it is 
to be found, — the more so as a whole series of 



2 6 INTRODUCTION. 

centuries stand at our service, into which we can 
thrust everything that ought to be in our creed, 
— but which is not there in reality. 

It is the same with the transition from organic 
to psychical activity. It is not yet ? But we be- 
lieve that it will be, and we bend all the powers of 
our intelligence to prove the possibility of this at 
last. 

Disputes as to that which does not concern life, 
namely, as to whence life proceeds — whether it is 
animism or vitalism, or, again, the idea of some 
special force — have concealed from men the prin- 
cipal question of life, — that question without 
which the conception of life loses its coherence, 
and have gradually led scientific men — those who 
should guide others — into the position of a man 
who should walk along, and even hasten his steps, 
but who should have forgotten whither he was 
going. 

Possibly, I am deliberately endeavoring not to 
see the vast results afforded by science in its 
present course? But, surely, no results can jus- 
tify a false course ? Let us concede the impossi- 
ble, — that all that contemporary science desires 
to know of life, and of which it asserts (though 



Introduction. 27 

it does not believe this itself) — that all this will 
be revealed ; let us concede that all has been re- 
vealed, that all is as clear as day, It is clear how 
organic material arises from inorganic through 
physical energy; it is clear how physical energy 
is converted into feeling, will, thought, and that 
all this is known not only to students in the gym- 
nasiums, but to village school-boys. 

I am aware that such and such thoughts and 
feelings proceed from such and such movements. 
Well, and what then ? Can I or can I not be 
guided by these movements, in order to arouse 
in myself these and other thoughts ; the question 
as to how I must awaken in myself and in others 
thoughts and feelings remains not only unsettled, 
but even untouched. 

I know that scientific men do not trouble them- 
selves to answer this question. The solution of 
this problem seems to them very simple, as the 
solution of a difficult problem always seems to a 
man who does not understand it. The answer to 
the question, how to regulate our life when it is 
in our power, seems very easy to men of science. 
They say : Regulate it so that people may satisfy 
their wants ; science provides means, in the first 



2 8 INTR on uc no AT. 

place, for the proper determination of wants, and, 
in the second, means to produce so easily and in 
such abundance that all wants can be easily satis- 
fied, and then people will be happy. 

But if we inquire what they call needs, and 
where lie the limits of needs, they simply reply : 
" Science — that is what science is for, to portion 
them out into physical, mental, aesthetic, even 
moral, and plainly to define what needs are legiti- 
mate and in what measure they are illegitimate. 
It will define this in course of time." But if they 
are asked how one must guide one's self in the 
decision as to the legitimacy and illegitimacy of 
needs, they reply boldly : " By the study of the 
needs." But the word need has only two mean- 
ings : either a condition of existence, and the 
conditions of existence of every object are innu- 
merable in quantity, and hence all the conditions 
cannot be studied, or the need of happiness for 
human beings can be known and determined only 
by consciousness, and are therefore even less 
susceptible of investigation by contemporary 
science. 

There is an institution, a corporation, an assem- 
bly of some sort, which is infallible, and which is 



INTRODUCTION. 2 g 

called science. It will determine all this in 
course of time. 

Is it not evident that all this settlement of the 
question is merely a paraphrase of the kingdom of 
the Messiah, in which the part of the Messiah is 
played by science, and that, for the sake of having 
the explanation explain anything, it is necessary 
to believe in the dogmas of science as indisputably 
as the Hebrews believe in the Messiah, which is 
what the orthodox scientists do, with this difference 
only, that the orthodox Jew, representing to him- 
self the Messiah as the envoy of God, can believe 
that all that the Messiah will establish by his 
power will be excellent, but the orthodox believer 
in science cannot, from the nature of things, be- 
lieve that by means of the external investigation 
of needs the chief and only question concerning 
life can be decided ? 



LIFE 



CHAPTER I. 

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTION OF 
HUMAN LIFE. 

■ Every man lives only for his own good, for his 
personal welfare. If man feels no desire for happi- 
ness, he is not even conscious that he is alive. 
Man cannot imagine life without the desire for hap- 
piness. To live is, for every man, the same thing 
as to desire and to attain bliss ; to desire and to 
attain bliss is synonymous with living. Man is 
conscious of life only in himself, only in his own 
personality, and hence, at first, man imagines that 
the bliss which he desires for himself personally 
is happiness, and nothing more. 

At first, it seems to him that he is truly alive, 
and he alone. 

The life of other beings seems to him not in 
3* 



32 LIFE. 

the least like his own. He imagines it as merely 
the semblance of life. Man only observes the life 
of other beings, and learns from observation only 
that they are alive. Man knows about the life of 
other beings when he is willing to think of them, 
but he knows of his own, he cannot for a single mo- 
ment cease to be conscious that he lives, and hence 
real life appears to every man as his own life only, 
while the life of other beings about him seems to 
him to be merely a condition of his own existence. 
If he does not desire evil to others, it is only be- 
cause the sight of the sufferings of others inter- 
feres with his happiness. If he desires good to 
others, it is not at all the same as for himself — it 
is not in order that the person to whom he wishes 
good may be well placed, but only in order that 
the happiness of other beings may augment the 
welfare of his own life. Only that happiness in 
this life is important and necessary to a man which 
he feels to be his own, i. e., his own individual 
happiness. 

And behold, in striving for the attainment of 
this, his own individual welfare, man perceives that 
his welfare depends upon other beings. And, 
upon watching and observing these other beings, 



CONTRADICTION OF HUMAN LIFE. 33 

man sees that all of them, both men and even 
animals, possess precisely the same conception of 
life as he himself. Each one of these beings, pre- 
cisely as in his own case, is conscious only of his 
own life, and his own happiness, considers his own 
life alone of importance, and real, and the life of 
all other beings only as a means to his individual 
welfare. Man sees that every living being, pre- 
cisely like himself, must be ready, for the sake of 
his petty welfare, to deprive all other beings of 
greater happiness and even of life. 

And, having comprehended this, man involun- 
tarily makes this calculation, that if this is so, 
and he knows that it is indubitably so, then, not 
one or not ten beings only, but all the innumer- 
able beings in the world, for the attainment, each 
of his own object, are ready every moment to 
annihilate him, that man for whom alone life 
exists. And, having apprehended this, man sees 
that his personal happiness, in which alone he un- 
derstands life, is not only not to be easily won by 
him, but that it will assuredly be taken from him. 

The longer a man lives, the more firmly is this 
conviction confirmed by experience, and the man 
perceives that the life of the world in which he 



34 LIFE - 

shares is composed of individualities bound to- 
gether, desirous of exterminating and devouring 
each other, not only cannot be a happiness for 
him, but will, assuredly, be a great evil. 

But, nevertheless, if the man is placed in 
such favorable conditions that he can successfully 
contend with other personalities, fearing nothing 
for his own, both experience and reason speedily 
show him, that even those semblances of happi- 
ness which he wrests from life, in the form of 
enjoyment for his own personality, do not consti- 
tute happiness, and are but specimens of happiness 
as it were, vouchsafed him merely in order that he 
may be the more vividly conscious of the suffering 
which is always bound up with enjoyment. 

The longer man lives, the more plainly does he 
see that weariness, satiety, toils, and sufferings 
become ever greater and greater, and enjoyments 
ever less and less. 

But this is not all. On beginning to become 
conscious of a decline of strength, and of ill-health, 
and gazing upon ill-health, age, and the death of 
others, he perceives this also in addition, that even 
his existence, in which alone he recognizes real, 
full life, is approaching weakness, old age, and 



CONTRADICTION OF HUMAN LIFE. 35 

death, with every hour, with every movement ; that 
his life, besides being subject to thousands of 
chances of annihilation from other beings warring 
with him, and from ever increasing sufferings, is, 
in virtue of its very nature, nothing else than an 
incessant approach to death ; to that condition in 
which together with the life of the individual will, 
assuredly, be annihilated every possibility of any 
personal happiness. The man perceives that he, 
his own personality, is that in which alone he 
feels life, that all he does is to struggle with 
those with whom it is impossible to struggle — 
with the whole world ; that he is in search of 
enjoyments which give only the semblances of 
happiness, and which always terminate in suffer- 
ings, and he wishes to hold back life, which it is 
impossible to hold back. The man perceives that 
he himself, his own personality, that for which; 
alone, he desires life and happiness, can have 
neither life nor happiness. And that which he 
desires to have — life and happiness — is pos- 
sessed only by those beings who are strangers to 
him, whom he does not feel, and cannot feel, and 
of whose existence he cannot know and does not 
wish to know. 



36 LIFE. 

That which for him is the most important of 
all, and which alone is necessary to him, that 
which — as it seems to him — alone possesses life 
in reality, his personality, that which will perish, 
will become bones and worms, is not he ; but 
that which is unnecessary for him, unimportant 
to him, all that world of ever changing and 
struggling beings, that is to say, real life, will 
remain, and will exist forever. So that the sole 
life which is felt by man, and which evokes all this 
activity, proves to be something deceptive and 
impossible ; but the inward life, which he does 
not love, which he does not feel, of which he is 
ignorant, is the one real life. 

That of which he is not conscious, — that alone 
possesses those qualities of which he would fain 
be the sole possessor. And this is not that which 
presents itself to a man in the evil moments of 
his gloomy moods, this is not a representation 
which it is possible for him not to have, but this 
is, on the contrary, such a palpable, indubitable 
truth, that if this thought once occurs to man, or 
if others explain it to him, he can never again free 
himself from it, he can never more force it out of 
his consciousness. 



'CHAPTER II. 



THE SOLE AIM OF LIFE. 



The sole aim of life, as it first presents itself to 
man, is the happiness of himself as an individual, 
but individual happiness there cannot be ; if there 
were anything resembling individual happiness in 
life, then that life in which alone happiness can 
exist, the life of the individual, is borne irresistibly, 
by every movement, by every breath, towards 
suffering, towards evil, towards death, towards 
annihilation. 

And this is so self-evident and so plain that 
every thinking man, old or young, learned or 
unlearned, will see it. 

This argument is so simple and natural that it 
presents itself to every reasoning man, and has 

1 The contradiction of life has been known to mankind from the 
most ancient time. The enlighteners of mankind expounded to 
men the definition of life, resolving it into an inward contradic- 
tion, but the Scribes and Pharisees conceal it from the people. 

37 



38 LIFE. 

been known to mankind ever since the most 
ancient times. 

" The life of man as an individual, striving only 
towards his own happiness, amid an endless num- 
ber of similar individuals, engaged in annihilating 
each other and in annihilating themselves, is evil 
and absurdity, and such real life cannot be." This 
is what man has been saying to himself from 
the most ancient times down to the present 
day, and this inward inconsistency of the life of 
man was expressed with remarkable force and 
clearness by the Indians, and the Chinese, and 
the Egyptians, and the Greeks, and the Jews, 
and from the most ancient times the mind of 
man has been directed to the study of such a 
happiness for man as should not be cancelled 
by the contest of beings among themselves, by 
suffering and by death. In the increasingly bet- 
ter solution of this indubitable, unavoidable con- 
test, by sufferings and by death of the happiness 
of man, lies the constant movement in advance 
from that time when we know his life. 

From the most ancient times, and among the 
most widely varying peoples, the great teachers 
of mankind have revealed to men more and more 



THE SOLE AIM OF LIFE. 39 

the clear definitions of life, solving its inward 
contradictions, and have pointed out the true 
happiness and true life which is proper to men. 

And, since the position of all men in the world 
is identical, since the contradictions of his striv- 
ings after his personal welfare and the conscious- 
ness of his powerlessness are identical for every 
man, all the definitions of true happiness of life, 
and, hence, of the true revelation to men by the 
grandest minds of humanity, are identical. 

" Life is the diffusion of that light which, for 
the happiness of men, descended upon them 
from heaven," said Confucius, six hundred years 
before Christ. 

" Life is the peregrination and the perfection 
of souls, which attain to greater and ever greater 
bliss," said the Brahmins of the same day. 

" Life is the abnegation of self, with the pur- 
pose of attaining blessed Nirvana," said Buddha, 
a contemporary of Confucius. 

" Life is the path of peacefulness and lowli- 
ness, for the attainment of bliss," said Loa-dzi, 
also a contemporary of Confucius. 

" Life is that which God breathed into man's 
nostrils, in order that he, by fulfilling his law, 



4 o LIFE - 

might receive happiness," says the Hebrew sage, 
Moses. 

" Life is submission to the reason, which gives 
happiness to man," said the Stoics. 

" Life is love towards God and our neighbor, 
which gives happiness to man," said Christ, sum- 
ming up in his definition all those which had 
preceded it. 

Such are the definitions of life, which, thou- 
sands of years before our day, pointing out to 
men real and indestructible bliss, in the place 
of the false and impossible bliss of individuality, 
solve the contradictions of human life and impart 
to it a reasonable sense. 

It is possible not to agree with these definitions 
of life, it is possible to assume that these defini- 
tions can be expressed more accurately and more 
clearly ; but it is impossible not to see that these 
definitions, equally with the acknowledgment of 
them, do away with the inconsistencies of life, 
and, replacing the aspiration for an unattainable 
bliss of individuality, by another aspiration, for 
a happiness indestructible by suffering and death, 
impart to life a reasonable sense. It is impossi- 
ble not to see this also, that these definitions, 



THE SOLE AIM OF LIFE. # ^ x 

being theoretically correct, are confirmed by the 
experience of life, and that millions and millions 
of men, who have accepted and who do accept 
such definitions of life, have, in fact, proved, and 
do prove, the possibility of replacing the aspira- 
tion towards individual welfare by an aspiration 
towards another happiness, of a sort which is not 
to be destroyed by suffering or death. 

But, in addition to those men who have under- 
stood and who do understand the definitions of 
life, revealed to men by the great enlighteners 
of humanity, and who live by them, there always 
have been and there are now many people who, 
during a certain period of their life, and some- 
times their whole life long, lead a purely animal 
existence, not only ignoring those definitions 
which serve to solve the contradictions of human 
life, but not even perceiving those contradictions 
which they solve. And there always have been 
and there now exist among those people men 
who, in consequence of their exclusively external 
position, regard themselves as called upon to 
guide mankind, and who, without themselves 
comprehending the meaning of human life, have 
taught and do teach other people life, which they 



4 2 LIFE. 

'themselves do not understand ; to the effect that 
human life is nothing but individual existence. 

Such false teachers have existed in all ages, and 
exist in our day also. Some confess in words the 
teachings of those enlighteners of mankind, in 
whose traditions they have been brought up, but, 
not comprehending their rational meaning, they 
convert these teachings into supernatural revela- 
tions as to the past and future life of men, and 
require only the fulfilment of ceremonial forms. 

This is the doctrine of the Pharisees, in the 
very broadest sense, i. e., of the men who teach 
that a life preposterous in itself can be amended 
by faith in a future life, obtained by the fulfilment 
of external forms. 

Others, who do not acknowledge the possibility 
of any other life than the visible one, reject every 
marvel and everything supernatural, and boldly 
affirm that the life of man is nothing but his ani- 
mal existence from his birth to his death. This 
is the doctrine of the Scribes — of men who teach 
that there is nothing preposterous in the life of 
man, any more than in that of animals. 

And both the former and the latter false 
prophets, in spite of the fact that the teaching of 



THE %SOLE AIM OF LIFE. 43 

both is founded upon the same coarse lack of 
understanding of the fundamental inconsistency 
of human life, have always been at enmity with 
each other, and are still at enmity. Both these 
doctrines reign in our world, and, contending with 
each other, they fill the world with their dissen- 
sions — by those same dissensions concealing from 
men those definitions of life which reveal the path 
to the true happiness of men, and which were 
given to men thousands of years ago. 

The Pharisees, not comprehending this defini- 
tion of life, which was given to men by those 
teachers in whose traditions they were brought 
up, replace it with their false interpretations of 
a future life, and, in addition to this, strive to 
conceal from men the definition of life of other 
enlighteners of humanity, by presenting the lat- 
ter to their disciples in the coarsest and harsh- 
est aspect, assuming that, by so doing, they will 
uphold the absolute authority of that doctrine 
upon which they found their interpretation. 1 

1 The unity of the rational idea of the definition of life by 
other enlighteners of mankind does not present itself to them as 
proof of the truth of their teaching, since it injures faith in the 
senseless, false interpretations with which they replace the sub- 
stance of doctrine. 



44 LIFE - 

And the Scribes, not even suspecting in the 
teachings of the Pharisees those intelligent 
grounds from which they took their rise, flatly 
reject all doctrines, and boldly affirm that all 
these doctrines have no foundation whatever, but 
are merely remnants of the coarse customs of 
ignorance, and that the forward movement of 
mankind consists in not putting any questions 
whatever to one's self, concerning life, which 
overleap the bounds of the animal existence of 
man. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ERROR OF THE SCRIBES. 

And, marvellous to relate ! the fact that all 
the teachings of the great minds of mankind so 
startled men by their grandeur that the rude- 
populace attributed to them, for the most part, a 
supernatural character, and accepted their authors 
as demi-gods, the very fact which serves as the 
chief indication of the importance of these doc- 
trines, that very fact serves the Scribes, so they 
think, as their best proof of the incorrectness 
and antiquated character of these doctrines. 

The fact that the insignificant teachings of 
Aristotle, Bacon, Comte, and others remained, 
and will always remain, the property of a small 
number of their readers and admirers, and can, 
on account of their falsity, never influence the 
masses, and hence were never subjected to super- 
stitious distortions and excrescences, — this mark 
of their insignificance is recognized as a proof of 

45 



46 LIFE. 

their truth. But the teachings of the Brahmins, 
of Buddha, of Zoroaster, Loa-dzi, Confucius, 
Isaiah, and Christ are accounted superstitious 
and erroneous, merely because these teachings 
have effected a change in the lives of millions. 

The fact that millions of men have lived, 
and do still live, according to these superstitions, 
because even in their mutilated form they furnish 
men with answers to questions about true happi- 
ness, the fact that these doctrines not only are 
shared by, but serve as a foundation for the 
thoughts of the best men of all ages, and that 
the theories professed by the Scribes alone are 
shared only by themselves, are always contested, 
and sometimes do not live ten years, and are for- 
gotten as quickly as they were evolved, does not 
disturb them in the least. 

On no point does that false direction of science 
followed by contemporary society express itself 
with such warmth as on the place which is held 
in this society by the doctrines of those great 
teachers of life by which mankind has lived and 
developed, and by which it still lives and develops 
itself : .it is affirmed in the calendars, in the 
department of statistical information, that the 



THE ERRORS OF THE SCRIBES. 47 

creeds now professed by the inhabitants of this 
globe number one thousand. Among the list of 
these creeds are reckoned Buddhism, Brahmanism, 
Confucianism, Taosism, and Christianity. There 
are a thousand creeds, and the people of our day 
believe this implicitly. There are a thousand 
creeds, they are all nonsense — why study them? 
And the men of our time consider it a disgrace if 
they do not know the latest apothegms of wis- 
dom of Spencer, Helmholtz, and others ; but of 
Brahma, Buddha, Confucius, Mentzuis, Loa-dzi, 
Epictetus, and Isaiah they sometimes know the 
names, and sometimes they do not even know 
that much. It never enters their heads that the 
creeds professed in our day number not one thou- 
sand, but three, in all : the Chinese, the Indian, 
and the European-Christian (with its offshoot, 
Mahometanism), and that the books pertaining to 
these faiths can be purchased for five rubles, and 
read through in two weeks, and that in these 
books, by which all mankind has lived and now 
lives, with the exception of seven per cent, 
almost unknown to us, is contained all human 
wisdom, all that has made mankind what it is. 
But, not only is the populace ignorant of these 



4 8 



LIFE. 



teachings ; the learned men are not acquainted 
with them, unless it is their profession ; philoso- 
phers by profession do not consider it necessary 
to glance into these books. 

And why, indeed, study those men who have 
solved the inconsistency of his life admitted by 
the sensible man, and have defined true happi- 
ness and the life of men ? 

The wise men, not understanding this contra- 
diction or inconsistency, which constitutes the 
beginning of intelligent life, boldly assert that 
there is no contradiction, because they do not 
perceive it, and that the life of man is merely his 
animal existence. 

Those who do see understand and define that 
which they see before them — the blind man 
fumbles before him with a cane, and asserts 
that nothing exists except that which the touch 
of his cane reveals to him. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE TEACHING OF THE WISE MEN, UNDER THE IDEA 
OF THE WHOLE LIFE OF MAN, PRESENTS THE 
VISIBLE PHENOMENA OF HIS ANIMAL EXISTENCE, 
AND FROM THEM DRAWS DEDUCTIONS AS TO 
THE AIM OF HIS LIFE. 

" Life is what takes place in a living being from 
the time of his birth to his death : a man, a dog, 
a horse, is born ; each one has his special body, 
and this special body of his lives and then dies ; 
the body decomposes, passes into other beings, 
but will never be the former being again. Life 
was, and life came to an end ; the heart beats, 
the lungs breathe, the body does not decompose, 
— which means that the man, the horse, the dog, 
is alive ; the heart has ceased to beat, breathing 
has come to an end, the body has begun to decom- 
pose, — which means that it is dead, and that there 
is no life. Life is that process which goes on 
in the body of man, as well as in that of the 

49 



5 o LIFE. 

animal, in the interval of time between birth 
and death. What can be clearer ? " 

Thus have the very rudest people, who have 
hardly emerged from animal existence, always 
looked upon life, and thus they look upon it 
now. And lo ! in our day, the teaching of 
the Scribes, entitling itself science, professes 
this same coarse, primitive presentation of life, 
as the only true one. Making use of all those 
instruments of inward knowledge which man- 
kind has acquired, this false teaching is sys- 
tematically desirous of leading man back into 
that gloom of ignorance from which he has 
been striving to escape for so many thousand 
years. 

" We cannot define life in our consciousness," 
says this doctrine. " We go astray when we 
observe it in ourselves. That conception of hap- 
piness, the aspiration towards which in our con- 
sciousness constitutes our life, is a deceitful illu- 
sion, and life cannot be understood in that con- 
sciousness. In order to understand life, it is only 
necessary to observe its manifestations as move- 
ments of matter. Only from these observations, 
and the laws deduced from them, can we discover 



TEACHING OF THE WISE MEN. tjj 

the law of life itself, and the law of the life of 
man. 1 " 

The science of physics talks of the laws and 
relations of forces, without putting to itself any 
questions as to what force is, and without en- 
deavoring to explain the nature of force. The 
science of chemistry speaks of the relations of 
matter, without questioning what matter is, and 
without seeking to define its nature ; the science of 
biology deals with the forms of life, putting to itself 
no questions as to what life is, and not seeking to 
define its nature. And force and matter and life 
are accepted as real, sciences, not as subjects for 
study, but adopted as axioms from other realms of 
learning, as bases of operation upon which is con- 
structed the edifice of every separate science. 
Thus does real science regard the subject, and 
this science cannot have any injurious influence 
upon the masses, inclining them to ignorance. 
But not thus does the false, philosophizing science 
look upon the subject. " We will study matter, 
and force, and life ; and, if we study them, we can 
know them," say they, not reflecting that they are 

1 Real science, knowing its proper place and hence its object, 
modest and hence powerful, never has said and never says this. 



52 



LIFE. 



not studying matter, force, and life, but merely 
their relations and their forms. 

And behold, false science, having placed under 
the conception of the whole life of man its visible 
portion, which is known to him through his con- 
sciousness, the animal existence, begins to study 
these apparent phenomena at first in the animal 
man, then in animals in general, then in plants, 
then in matter, constantly asserting, in the mean- 
while, that they are studying not a few phenomena, 
but life itself. Their observations are so compli- 
cated, so varied, so confused, so much time and 
strength have been wasted upon them, that men 
gradually forget the original error of admitting a 
portion of the subject as the whole subject, and 
finally become fully convinced that the study of 
the visible properties of matter, plants, and ani- 
mals is study of life itself, of that life which is 
known to man only through his consciousness. 
What takes place is somewhat similar to that 
which happens when a person is showing some- 
thing in the dark, and is desirous of upholding 
that mistake under which the spectators are labor- 
ing. 



TEACHING OF THE WISE MEN. 53 

" Look nowhere," says the exhibitor, " except in 
the direction where the reflections appear, and, 
most of all, do not look at the object itself; for 
there is no object, but only its reflection. " This 
is the very thing which the false science of the 
Scribes of our day does, conniving with the rude 
throng, looking upon life without the chief definition 
of its aspiration towards happiness, which is discov- 
ered only in the consciousness of man. 1 Proceed- 
ing directly from the definition of life independ- 
ent of the aspiration towards happiness, false 
science observes the objects of human beings, 
and, finding in them aims foreign to man, forces 
them upon him. 

The aim of human beings, as presented by these 
external observations, is the preservation of one's 
individuality, the preservation of one's aspect, the 
production of others similar to one, and the strug- 
gle for existence, and this same fancied aim of 
life is also thrust on man. 

False science, having adopted as a base of oper- 
ation an antiquated presentation of life, in which 
that contradiction of human life which constitutes 

1 See appendix at the end of the book, on " the false definition 
of life." 



54 LIFE. 

its chief property is not visible, this fictitious 
science in its most extreme deductions arrives at 
such a point which the coarse majority of man- 
kind requires, at the admission of the possibility 
of the happiness of individual life alone, to the 
admission for humanity of the happiness of the 
animal existence alone. 

False science goes much further even than the 
demands of the coarse herd for whom it wishes to 
find an explanation require ; it arrives at the as- 
sertion that it rejects the rational consciousness 
of man from its first flash, it arrives at the deduc- 
tion that the life of man, like that of every animal, 
consists in the struggle for the existence of indi- 
viduality, race and species. 1 

1 See second appendix. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE FALSE DOCTRINES OF THE SCRIBES AND PHAR- 
ISEES GIVE NEITHER EXPLANATIONS OF THE 
MEANING OF REAL LIFE, NOR GUIDANCE FOR IT J 
THE SOLE GUIDE FOR LIFE APPEARS AS THE 
INERTIA OF LIFE, WHICH HAS NO RATIONAL EX- 
PLANATION. 

" It is useless to define life ; every one knows 
it, so let us live," say, in words of error, the men 
who are upheld by false teachings. And, not know- 
ing what life and its happiness are, it seems to 
them that they live, as it may seem to a man who 
is being borne along by the waves, without exer- 
cising any control of his course, that he is sailing 
to the place where he should go, and where he 
wishes to go. 

A child is born in want or in luxury, and he 
receives the training of the Pharisees or of the 
Scribes. For the child, for the young man, there 
exists as yet no contradiction in life nor problems 
in connection with it, and therefore neither the 

55 



56 LIFE. 

explanations of the Pharisees nor the explanations 
of the Scribes are necessary to him, and they can- 
not govern his life. He learns simply from the 
example of the people who live about him, and 
this is equally the example of the Scribes and 
Pharisees; and both the former and the latter 
live only for personal happiness, and this is what 
they teach him. 

If his parents are poor, he learns from them 
that the aim of life is the acquisition of as much 
bread and money as possible, and as little work as 
possible, so that his animal person may be as 
comfortable as possible. 

If he has been born in luxury, he will learn that 
the aim of life is wealth, and honors, so that he 
may pass his time in the merriest and most agree- 
able manner possible. 

All the knowledge acquired by the poor man is 
of use to him only for the purpose of improving 
the comfortable condition of his own person. All 
the attainments in science and art acquired by the 
rich man are of use to him only for the combating 
of ennui, and passing the time pleasantly. The 
longer both of them live, the more and more 
strongly do they imbibe the prevailing views of 



FALSE DOCTRINES. 57 

men of the world. They marry, have families, and 
their thirst for the acquisition of animal welfare of 
life is augmented with the justification of their 
families ; the struggle with others grows fiercer, 
and arranges the inertia of custom of life solely 
with a view to the welfare of the individual. 

And if there occurs to either the rich or the 
poor man a doubt as to the reasonableness of such 
a life, if to either there presents itself the question, 
"What is the reason for this objectless struggle 
for my existence, which my children will continue ? 
or why this delusive pursuit of enjoyments, which 
end in suffering for me and for my children ? " 
then there is hardly any likelihood that he will 
learn those definitions of life which were given 
long ago to mankind by its great teachers, who 
found themselves thousands of years before him in 
the same situation. The teachings of the Scribes 
and Pharisees so thickly veils them that he rarely 
succeeds in seeing them. The Pharisees alone, to 
the question, "To what purpose this miserable 
life ? " make reply : " Life is miserable, and always 
has been so, and must always be so ; the happiness 
of life consists not in its present, but in the past, 
before life was, and in the future, after life is ended.'* 



58 LIFE. 

Brahmin, and Buddhist, and Taoist, and Jewish, 
and Christian Pharisees always say one and the 
same thing. The present life is evil, and the 
explanation of this evil lies in the past, in the 
apparition of the world and of man ; but the cor- 
rection of the existing evil lies in the future, be- 
yond the grave. All that man can do for the 
acquisition of happiness, not in this but in a future 
life, is to believe in that teaching which we impart 
to you, — in the fulfilment of the ceremonial forms 
which we prescribe. And the doubter, perceiving 
in the life of all men, who are living for their own 
happiness, and in the life of the very Pharisees, 
who live only for the same thing, the falsity of 
this explanation, and not penetrating the meaning 
of their reply, simply refuses to believe them, 
and betakes himself to the Scribes. 

" All teachings about any other life whatever 
than this which we see in the animal is the fruit 
of ignorance," say the Scribes. " All your doubts 
as to the reasonableness of your life are empty 
fancies. The life of worlds, of the earth, of man, 
of animals, of plants, have their laws, and we will 
investigate them, we will study the origin of 
worlds, and of man, of animals and plants, and of 



F^LSE DOCTRINES. ^q 

all matter ; we will also investigate what awaits 
the worlds when the sun shall cool, and so forth, 
and what has been and what will be with man, 
and with every animal and plant. We can show 
and prove that all has been so and will be as we 
say ; besides this, our investigations will, in addi- 
tion, contribute to the amelioration of mankind. 
But of your life and your aspirations towards 
happiness, we can tell you nothing more than 
what you already know without us : you are alive, 
so live as best you can." 

And the doubter, having received no reply to 
his question from these either, remains as he was 
before, without any guidance whatever in life, ex- 
cept the impulses of his own personality. 

Some of the doubters, according to the reason- 
ing of Pascal, having said to themselves : " What 
if all the things with which the Pharisees frighten 
us for non-fulfilment of their prescribed forms 
should be true ?" and so fulfil in their leisure time 
all the dictates of the Pharisees (there can be no 
loss, and there is a possibility that the profit may 
be great), while others, agreeing with the Scribes, 
flatly reject any other life, and all religious forms, 
and say to themselves : " Not I alone, but all the 



60 LIFE - 

rest, have lived and do live thus, — let what will 
be be." And this discrepancy confers no superi- 
ority on either the one or the other ; and both the 
former and the latter remain without any explana- 
tion whatever of the meaning of their present 
life. 

But it is necessary to live. 

Human life is a series of actions from the time 
a man rises until he goes to bed ; every day, man 
must incessantly make his choice out of hundreds 
of actions which are possible to him, of those which 
he will perform. Neither the teaching of the 
Pharisees, who explain the mysteries of the heav- 
enly life, nor the teaching of the Scribes, who in- 
vestigate the origin of worlds, and of man, and 
who draw conclusions concerning their future fate, 
furnishes that guidance to man, in the choice of his 
actions, without which man cannot live. And so 
the man submits, perforce, not to reason, but to 
that external guidance of life which has always 
existed, and does exist in every community of 
men. 

This guidance has no rational explanation, but 
it directs the vast majority of the actions of all 
men. This guidance is the habit of life of com- 



FALSE DOCTRINES. fa 

l 

munities of men, ruling all the more powerfully- 
over men in proportion as men have less compre- 
hension of their life. This guidance cannot be 
accurately expressed, because it is composed of 
facts and actions, the most varied as to place and 
time. It is lights upon the boards of their ances- 
tors for the Chinese ; pilgrimages to famous 
places for the Mahometan ; a certain amount of 
prayer words for the Indian ; it consists of fidelity 
to his flag, and honor to his uniform, for the war- 
rior ; the duel for the man of the world ; blood- 
vengeance for the mountaineer; it means certain 
sorts of food on specified days, a particular mode 
of education for one's children ; it means visits, a 
certain decoration of one's dwelling, specified man- 
ners of celebrating funerals, births and deaths. 
It signifies an interminable number of facts and 
actions, filling the whole of life. It means what 
is called propriety, custom, and, most frequently 
of all, duty, and sacred duty. 

And it is to this guidance that the majority of 
mankind submit themselves, in spite of the teach- 
ing of the explanations of life furnished by the 
Scribes and Pharisees. Man beholds everywhere 
about him, from his very childhood,, men accom- 



62 LIFE. 

plishing those deeds with full assurance and so- 
lemnity, and possessing no rational explanation of 
their life, and the man not only begins to do the 
same things, but even attempts to ascribe a ra- 
tional meaning to these deeds. He wishes to be- 
lieve that the men who do these things possess an 
explanation of the reasons for which they do what 
they do. And he begins to be convinced that 
these deeds have a rational meaning, if not wholly 
known to him, yet known to these persons at least. 
But the majority of the rest of mankind, not 
being possessed of a rational explanation of life, 
find themselves in precisely the same situation as 
himself. They do these things only because 
others, who, as it seems to them, have an explana- 
tion of these deeds, demand the same from them. 
And thus, involuntarily deceiving each other, peo- 
ple become ever more and more accustomed not 
only to .do these things without possessing a ra- 
tional explanation, but they become accustomed to 
ascribing to these deeds some mysterious sense in- 
comprehensible even to themselves. And the less 
they understand the meaning of what they do, the 
more doubtful to themselves these acts become, 
the more importance do they attach to them, and 



FALSE DOCTRINES. 63 



with all the greater solemnity do they fulfil them. 
And the rich man and the poor man do that which 
others do about them, and they designate these 
acts as their duty, their sacred duty, reassuring 
themselves by the thought that what has been 
done so long by so many people, and is so highly 
prized by them, cannot but be the real business of 
life. And men live on to hoar old age, to death, 
striving to believe that if they themselves do not 
know why they live, others do know this — the 
very people who know precisely as little about it 
as those who depend upon them. 

New people come into existence, are born, 
grow up, and, looking upon this whirlpool of ex- 
istence called life, — in which old, gray, respected 
men, surrounded by the reverence of the people, 
assert that this senseless commotion is life, and 
that there is no other, — go away after being 
jostled at its doors. Such a man who has never 
beheld assemblies of men, on seeing a crowding, 
lively, noisy throng at the entrance, and having 
decided that this is the assembly itself, after hav- 
ing been elbowed at the door, goes home with 
aching ribs and under the full conviction that he 
has been in the assembly. 



64 LIFE ' 

We pierce mountains, we fly round the world, 
electricity, microscopes, telephones, wars, parlia- 
ments, philanthropy, the struggle of parties, 
universities, learned societies, museums, — is 
this life? 

The whole of men's complicated, seething ac- 
tivity, with their trafficking, their wars, their roads 
of communication, their science and their arts, 
are, for the most part, only the thronging of the 
unintelligent crowd about the doors of life. 



CHAPTER VI. 

DIVISION OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE MEN OF OUR 
WORLD. 

" But verily, verily, I say unto you, the time is 
at hand, and is even now come, when the dead 
shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and, hear- 
ing, shall be made alive," and this time will come. 

However much a man may have assured him- 
self, and however much others may have assured 
him of this — that life can only be happy and 
rational beyond the grave, or that only personal 
life can be happy and rational, — man cannot be- 
lieve it. Man possesses, in the depths of his 
soul, an ineffaceable demand that his life shall be 
happy and have a rational meaning ; but a life 
having before it no other aim than the life beyond 
the grave, or an impossible bliss of personality, is 
evil and nonsense. 

" Life for the future life ? " says the man to 
himself : but if this life, the only specimen of life 
with which I am acquainted, — my present life, — 

65 



66 LIFE - 

must be irrational, then it not only does not con- 
firm in my mind the possibility of another, a ra- 
tional life, but, on the contrary, it convinces me that 
life is, in its very substance, irrational, and that 
there can be no other life than an irrational one. 

Live for myself ? But my individual life is evil 
and senseless. Live for my family? For my 
society ? for my country or even for mankind ? 
But if the life of my person is miserable and 
senseless, then the life of every other human per- 
son is miserable and senseless also ; and therefore 
an endless quantity of senseless and irrational 
persons, collected together, will not form even one 
happy and rational life. Live for myself, not 
knowing why, doing that which others do ? But, 
surely, I am aware that others know no more 
than I why they do what they do. 

The time will come when a rational conscious- 
ness will outgrow the false doctrines, and man 
will come to a halt in the midst of life, and de- 
mand explanations. 1 

Only the rare man, who has no connection with 
people of other modes of life, and only the man 
who is constantly engaged in an intense struggle 

1 See third appendix at the end of the book. 



DIVISION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. fiy 

with nature for the support of his bodily existence, 
can believe that the fulfilment of those senseless 
acts which he calls his duty can be the peculiar 
duty of his life. 

The time is coming, and is already come, 
When that delusion which gives out the renuncia- 
tion — in words — of this life, for the sake of pre- 
paring for one's self one in the future, and the ad- 
mission of the mere animal existence alone as life, 
and so-called duty as the business of life, — when 
that delusion will become clear to the majority of 
men, and only those forced by necessity, and 
dulled by a vicious career, will be able to exist 
without being conscious of the senselessness and 
poverty of their existence. 

More and more frequent will be men's awaken- 
ing to a rational sense ; they will become alive 
again in their graves, and the fundamental contra- 
diction of human life will, in spite of all men's 
efforts to hide it from themselves, present itself 
before the majority of men with terrible power 
and distinctness. 

" All my life consists of a desire for happiness 
for myself," says the man to himself, on awaken- 
ing, " but my reason tells me that this happiness 



68 LIFE. 

cannot exist for me, and that, whatever I may do, 
whatever I may attain to, all will end in one and 
the same thing — in sufferings and death, in anni- 
hilation. I desire happiness, I desire life, I de- 
sire a rational sense, but in myself and in all who 
surround me there is evil, death, and incoherence. 
How am I to exist ? How am I to live ? What 
am I to do ? " and there is no reply. 

The man looks about him, and seeks an answer 
to his question, and finds it not. He finds around 
him doctrines which answer questions which he 
has never put, and which he never will put to 
himself ; but there is no answer in the world sur- 
rounding him to the question which he does put 
to himself. There is one anxiety for men who 
do, without themselves knowing why, the things 
which others do, when they themselves know not 
why. 

All live as though unconscious of the wretched, 
ness of their position and the senselessness of their 
activity. "Either they are irrational or I am," 
says the awakened man to himself. " But all can- 
not be irrational, it must be that the irrational one 
is myself. But no — the reasoning / which says 
this to me cannot be irrational. Let it stand alone 



DIVISION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 69 

against all the world, but I cannot do otherwise 
than trust it." 

And the man recognizes himself as alone in all 
the world, with all the terrible questions which 
rend his soul. 

But it is necessary to live. 

On°. /, his individuality, bids him live. 

But another /, his reason, says, " It is impossi- 
ble to live." 

The man is conscious that he has been parted in 
twain, and this torturing partition rends his soul. 

And the cause of this partition and of his suf- 
fering seems to him to be his reason. 

Reason, the loftiest of man's faculties, which is 
indispensable to his life, which gives to him, 
naked and helpless amid the powers of nature 
which destroy him, both means of existence and 
means of enjoyment, — this faculty poisons his ex- 
istence. In all the world which surrounds him, 
among living beings, the faculties peculiar to these 
beings are necessary to them all in common, and 
constitute their happiness. Plants, insects, ani- 
mals, 'submitting to the law of their being, live a 
blissful, joyous, tranquil life. 

But behold, in man, this loftiest faculty of his 



j LIFE. 

nature produces in him such an astounding condi- 
tion of things that often — with ever increasing 
frequency of late days — man cuts the Gordian 
knot of his life, and kills himself simply for the 
sake of escaping from the torturing inward contra- 
dictions produced by intelligent consciousness, 
which has been carried to the last degree of ten- 
sion in our day. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE PARTITION OF SENSE ARISES FROM THE BLEND- 
ING OF THE LIFE OF THE ANIMAL WITH THE LIFE 
OF MAN. 

It seems to man that the partition of sense 
which has awakened within him shatters his life in 
fragments and brings it to a stand-still, only be- 
cause he recognizes as his life that which has not 
been, is not, and could not be his life. 

Having been reared and having grown up in the 
false doctrines of our world, which have confirmed 
in him the conviction that his life is nothing else 
than his individual existence, which began with 
his birth, it seems to man that he lived when he 
was a boy, a baby ; then it seems to him that he 
has lived, without a break, when he was a youth 
and when he had reached full manhood. He has 
lived a very long time, as it seems to him, and 
during all that time has never ceased to live, and 
lo, all at once, he has reached a point where it has 

71 



72 LIFE - 

become indubitably clear to him that it is impossi- 
ble for him to continue to live as he has lived 
before, and that his life has stopped and been 
shattered. 

False teaching has confirmed him in the idea 
that his life is the period of time . from birth to 
death ; and, looking at the life of animals, he has 
confounded the idea of apparent life with his con- 
sciousness, and has become quite convinced that 
this life which he can see is his life. 

The intelligent consciousness which has awak- 
ened within him, having advanced such demands 
as are not to be satisfied by the animal life, shows 
him the error of his conception of life ; but the 
false teaching, having eaten into him, prevents his 
confessing his error; he cannot reject his concep- 
tion of life as an animal existence, and it seems to 
him that his life has come to a stand-still through 
the awakening of intelligent consciousness. But 
that which he calls his life, his existence since his 
birth, has never been his life ; his idea that he has 
been living all the time from his birth to the pres- 
ent moment is an illusion of the senses, similar to 
the illusion of the senses in the visions of sleep ; 
up to the time of his awakening he had no visions, 



THE PARTITION OF SENSE. 73 



they have all formed at the moment of his awaken- 
ing. Before the awakening of his intelligent con- 
sciousness, there was no life of any sort ; his con- 
ception of his past life was formed at the awaken- 
ing of his intelligent consciousness. 

A man has lived like an animal during the pe- 
riod of his childhood, and has known nothing of 
life. If the man had lived only ten months, he 
would never have known anything about his own 
existence or any one else's ; just as little would he 
have known of life had he died in his mother's 
womb. And not only can the boy not know, but 
the unintelligent grown-up men and the utter idiot 
cannot know that they live, and that other human 
beings live. And therefore they have no human 
life. 

Man's life begins only with the appearance of 
rational consciousness, — of that which reveals to 
man simultaneously his life in the present and the 
past, and the life of other individuals, and all that 
flows inevitably from the relations of these indi- 
viduals, sufferings and death, — of that same thing 
which calls forth in him the renunciation of personal 
happiness in life, and the inconsistency which, as 
it seems to him, brings his life to a stand-still. 



74 LIFE, 

Man wishes to define his life by dates, as he 
defines an existence outside himself which he sees, 
and all of a sudden a life awakens in him, which 
does not correspond with the dates of his birth in 
the flesh, and he wants to believe that that which 
is not defined by dates can be life. But, seek as 
a man may, at the time of that shock, which he 
can consider as the beginning of his rational life, 
he will never find it. 1 

1 Nothing is more common than to hear discussions as to the 
birth and development of man's life, and of life in general, accord- 
ing to dates. It seems to people who reason thus, that they stand 
on the very firm ground of reality, but, nevertheless, there is noth- 
ing more fantastic than discussions of the development of life by 
dates. These discussions resemble the actions of a man who 
should undertake to measure a line, and who should not place a 
mark at the one point which he knows, on which he stands, but 
should take imaginary points on an endless line, at various and 
indefinite distances from himself, and from them should measure 
the distance to himself. Is not this the very thing that men do 
when they discuss the origin and development of life in man? In 
fact, where can we take, on that endless line which represents de- 
velopment — from the past in the life of man, — that arbitrary 
point, from which it is possible to begin the fantastic history of the 
development of this life ? In the birth or generation of the child 
or of his parents, or, still further back, in the original animal, and 
protoplasm, in the first bit that broke away from the sun ? Surely, 
all these discussions will be the most arbitrary fantasies — a 
measuring without measures. 



THE PARTITION OF SENSE. j? 

i 

He will never find, in his reminiscences, that 
point, that beginning of rational consciousness. 
He imagines that rational consciousnesss has al- 
ways existed in him. But if he does find some- 
thing which bears a resemblance to the begin- 
ning of this sense, he does not, by any means, 
find it in his birth in the flesh, but in a realm 
which has nothing in common with that birth in 
the flesh. He recognizes his rational origin not 
as at all the same as his birth in the flesh seems 
to him. When questioning himself as to his ra- 
tional sense, man never imagines that he, as a 
rational being, was the son of his father and 
mother and the grandson of his grandfathers and 
grandmothers, who were born in such and such a 
year ; but he always recognizes himself, not as a 
son but as joined in one through his consciousness 
with other reasoning beings, the most remote from 
him in point of time and place, who have sometimes 
lived a thousand years before him, and at the other 
end of the world. In his rational consciousness, 
man does not even perceive his origin at all, but he 
recognizes his union with other rational conscious- 
nesses, independent of time and space, so that they 
enter into him and he enters into them. And this 



76 LIFE. 

rational sense, awakened in man, seems to bring to 
a halt that semblance of life which the error of 
men regards as life : to people in error it seems 
that their life stops just when it has first been 
aroused. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THERE IS NO DIVISION AND CONTRADICTION, IT 
ONLY SO APPEARS THROUGH FALSE DOCTRINE. 

Only the false doctrine of human life, as the 
existence of an animal from birth to death, in 
which men are reared and upheld, produces that 
torturing condition of division into which men 
enter on the discovery in them of their rational 
consciousness. 

To a man who finds himself laboring under this 
error, it seems as though the life within him were 
being rent in twain. 

Man knows that his life is a unit, but he feels 
that it consists of two parts. A man, when he 
has crooked two fingers, and is rolling a little ball 
between them, knows that there is but one ball, 
but he feels as though there were two. Some- 
thing of the same sort occurs with the man who 
has acquired a false idea of life. 

A false direction has been imparted to the mind 
of man. He has been taught to recognize as life 

77 



;8 LIFE. 

his one, fleshly, individual existence, which cannot 
be life. 

With the same false conception of life as he 
imagines it, he has looked upon life and has beheld 
two lives — the one which he has imagined to him- 
self, and the one which actually exists. 

To such a man it seems as though the renuncia- 
tion by his rational sense of the individual happi- 
ness of existence, and the demand for a different 
bliss, is something sickly and unnatural. 

But, for man as a rational being, the renuncia- 
tion of the possibility of personal happiness and 
life is the inevitable consequence of the conditions 
of personal life, and a property of the rational con- 
sciousness connected with it. The renunciation 
of personal happiness and life is, for a rational 
being, as natural a property of his life as flying 
on its wings, instead of running on its feet, is 
for a bird. If the feathered fowl runs on its legs, 
it does not prove that it is not its nature to 
fly. If we see around us men with unawakened 
consciousness, who consider that their life lies in 
the happiness of themselves as individuals, this 
does not prove that man is incapable of living a 
rational life. The awakening of man to the true 



NO DIVISION AND CONTRADICTION jg 

i 

life which is peculiar to him takes place in our 
circles, with such a painful effort, merely because 
the false teaching of the world strives to convince 
men that the phantom of life is life itself, and that 
the appearance of true life is the violation of it. 

With the people of our world who enter into 
true life, something of the same sort happens as 
would take place with a maiden from whom the 
nature of woman had been concealed. On feeling 
the symptoms of pregnancy, such a maiden would 
take a condition which summons her to the obli- 
gations and duties of a mother, for an unhealthy 
and unnatural condition, and be driven to despair. 

The self-same despair is felt by the men of our 
world, at the first symptoms of awakening to the 
real life of man. 

The man in whom rational sense has awakened, 
but who, at the same time, understands his life 
only as a personality, finds himself in that position 
of torture in which an animal would find itself, 
which, having acknowledged its life as the move- 
ment of matter, should not have recognized its law 
of individuality, but should have merely seen its 
life in subjection to laws of matter, which go on 
without its efforts. Such an animal would experi- 



80 LIFE - 

ence a painful inward contradiction and division. 
By submitting itself to the one law of matter, it 
would see that its life consists in lying still and 
breathing, but its individuality would have required 
something else from it ; food for itself, a continua- 
tion of its species, and then it would seem to the 
animal that it suffered division and contradiction. 
"Life," it would say to itself, "consists in sub- 
mitting to the laws of gravity, i. e., in not moving, 
in lying still and in submitting to the chemical 
processes which go on in the body, and lo, I am 
doing that, but I must move, and procure myself 
food, and seek a male or a female." The animal 
would suffer, and would perceive in this condition 
a painful inconsistency and division. 

The same thing takes place with a man who has 
been taught to recognize the lower law of his life, 
the animal individuality, as the law of his life. 
The highest law of life, the law of his rational 
sense, demands from him another, and the life 
surrounding him on all sides, and false doctrines, 
retain him in a deceptive consciousness. 

But, as the animal, in order that it may cease to 
suffer, must confess as its law not the lower law 
of matter, but the law of its personality, and, by 



NO DIVISION AND CONTRADICTION. 8 1 



fulfilling it, profit by the laws of matter for the 
satisfaction of its aims as an individual, exactly so 
is it only requisite for a man to recognize his life 
not in the lower law of individuality, but in the 
higher law, which includes the first law, — in the 
law revealed to him in his rational sense, — and 
the inconsistency is annihilated, and he, as an 
individual, will be free to submit himself to his 
rational consciousness, and it will serve him. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE BIRTH OF TRUE LIFE IN MAN. 

By observing the dates, by watching the appear- 
ance of life in the human being, we see that true 
life is preserved in man, as it is preserved in the 
seed of grain ; and that a time comes when this 
life makes its appearance. The appearance of true 
life consists in the animal personality inclining 
man to his own happiness, while his rational sense 
shows him the impossibility of personal happiness, 
and points him to another bliss. Man looks at 
this happiness, which is pointed out to him in the 
distance, is incapable of seeing it, at first does 
not believe in this bliss, and turns back to personal 
happiness ; but the rational sense, which thus indis- 
tinctly indicates his happiness to him, so indubi- 
tably and convincingly demonstrates the impossi- 
bility of individual happiness that man once more 
renounces individual happiness and takes another 
look at this new happiness which has been pointed 
out to him. No rational happiness is visible, but 

82 



THE BIRTH OF TRUE LIFE IN MAN. g-? 

personal happiness is so indubitably destroyed that 
it is impossible to continue individual existence, and 
in the man there begins to form a new relation of 
his animal to his rational sense. The man begins 
to be born into the true life of mankind. 

Something of the same sort takes place which 
takes place in the material world at every birth. 
The child is born not because it desires to be born, 
because it is better for it to be born, and because 
it knows that it is good to be born, but because it 
is ready, and can no longer continue its previous 
existence; it must yield itself to a new life, not 
so much because the new life calls it as because 
the possibility of the former existence has been 
annihilated. 

Rational sense, imperceptibly springing up in 
his person, grows to such a point that life in his 
own personality becomes impossible. 

What takes place is precisely what takes place 
at the birth of everything. The same annihilation 
of the germ of the previous form of life, and the 
appearance of a new shoot, the same apparent 
strife of the preceding form, decomposing the 
germ, and the increase in size of the shoot — and 
the same nourishment of the shoot at the expense 



g 4 LIFE. 

of the decomposing germ. The difference for us 
between the birth of the rational sense from the 
fleshly birth visible to us consists in this, that, 
while in the fleshly birth we see, in due time and 
space, from what and how, when and what is born 
from the embryo, we know that the seed is the 
fruit, that from the seed, under certain well known 
conditions, a plant will proceed, that there will be 
a flower upon it, and then fruit, of the same sort 
as the seed (the entire cycle of life is accom- 
plished before our very eyes), — the growth of the 
rational sense we do not perceive in time, and we 
do not see its cycle. We do not see all the growth 
of the rational sense, and its cycle, because we 
are ourselves accomplishing it ; our life is nothing 
else than the birth of this being, invisible to us, 
which is brought forth within us, and hence we 
can in no wise see it. 

We cannot see the birth of this new being, of 
this new relation of the rational sense to the ani- 
mal, just as the seed cannot see the growth of its 
stalk. When the rational sense emerges from its 
concealed condition, and reveals itself to us, it 
seems to us that we experience a contradiction. 
But there is no contradiction whatever, as there is 



THE BIRTH OF TRUE LIFE IN MAN g$ 
i 
none in the sprouting seed. In the sprouting 

seed we perceive only that the life, which formerly 
resided only within the covering of the seed, has 
now passed into the shoot. Precisely the same 
in man, on the awakening of the rational 
sense, there is no contradiction whatever, there is 
only the birth of a new being, of a new relation- 
ship of the rational sense to the animal. 

If a man exists without knowing that other indi- 
viduals live, without knowing that pleasures do 
not satisfy him, that he will die, — he does not 
even know that he lives, and that there is no con- 
tradiction in him. 

But if a man has perceived that other individ- 
uals are the same as himself, that sufferings 
menace him, that his existence is a slow death, he 
will no longer place his life in that decomposing 
personality, but he must inevitably place it in that 
new life which is opening before him. And again 
there is no contradiction, as there is no contradic- 
tion in the seed, which sends forth a shoot and 
then dies. 



CHAPTER X. 

REASON IS THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT BY MAN OF 
THE LAWS ACCORDING TO WHICH HIS LIFE MUST 
BE ACCOMPLISHED. 

The true life of man is revealed in the relation 
of his rational sense to his animal personality. 
But what is this rational sense ? It only begins 
when the renunciation of the happiness of the 
animal personality begins. But the renunciation 
of the happiness of the animal personality only 
begins when the rational sense is aroused. The 
Gospel of John begins by saying that the Word, 
Logos (sense, wisdom, word), is the beginning, and 
that in it is all and from it comes all ; and that 
therefore reason is that which determines all the 
rest, and which cannot be determined by anything 
else. 

Reason cannot be determined, and we are not 
called upon to determine it, because we all of us 
not only know it, but because reason is the only 
thing that we do know. Communicating one with 

86 



REASON. Sy 

t 

another, we are convinced beforehand, more th^n 
of anything else, of the identical duty for all of us 
of this common reason. We are convinced that 
reason is the only chain which unites all of us 
living beings together in one. We know reason 
most firmly and earliest of all because all that we 
know in the world we know only because that 
which we know is consonant with the laws of that 
reason, which is indubitably known to us. We 
know reason and it is impossible for us not to 
know it. It is impossible because reason is that 
law by which reasoning beings — men — must in- 
evitably live. Reason is for man that law in ac- 
cordance with which his life is perfected, such a 
law as is that law for the animal in accordance 
with which it feeds and reproduces itself, as is that 
law for the plant in accordance with which grows 
and blossoms the grass or the tree, — as is that 
law for the heavenly bodies in accordance with 
which the earth and the stars move. And the law 
which we know in ourselves as the law of our life 
is that law in accordance with which are accom- 
plished all the external phenomena of the world. 
Only with this difference, that we know this differ- 
ence, that we know this law in ourselves, as that 



88 LIFE - 

which we ourselves must fulfil, — and in external 
phenomena as that which is fulfilled in accordance 
with that law, for our participation. All that we 
know about the world is only what we see accom- 
plished outside of us, in the heavenly bodies, in 
animals, in plants, in all the world, subject to 
reason. 

In the outer world we see this subjection to the 
law of reason ; but in ourselves we know this law, 
as that which we are bound to fulfil. 

The common error in regard to life consists in 
this, that the subjection of our animal body to 
the law, not accomplished by us, but only seen by 
us, is taken for life, while this law of our animal 
body, with which our rational consciousness is 
bound up, is accomplished in our animal bodies as 
unconsciously to ourselves as it is accomplished in 
a tree, a crystal, a heavenly body. 

But the law of our life — the subservience of 
our animal body to our reason — is the law which 
we nowhere see,, because it has not yet been ac- 
complished, but will be accomplished by us in our 
life. In the fulfilment of this law, for the attain- 
ment of happiness, consists our life. By not 
understanding that the happiness of our life con- 



\ 



REASON. Sg 

sists in the subjection of our animal personality 
to the law of reason, and taking happiness and 
the existence of our animal personality for our 
whole life, and rejecting the work of life which 
has been appointed for us, we deprive ourselves 
of our true happiness and our real life ; in place 
of it we set up that existence which we can see, 
of our animal activity, which operates independ- 
ently of us, and which cannot, therefore, be our 
life. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE FALSE DIRECTION OF LEARNING. 

The error of supposing that the law accom- 
plished in our animal persons, and visible to us, is 
the law of our life, is an ancient one, into which 
men have always fallen, and into which they still 
fall. This error, concealing from men the chief 
subject of their knowledge, sets in its place a 
study of the existence of men, independent of the 
happiness of life. 

This false knowledge directs its efforts to the 
study of happiness alone, and, not having in 
view the chief object of knowledge, directs its 
efforts to the study of the animal existence of 
past and contemporary people, and to the study 
of the conditions of existence of man in general, 
as an animal. It seems to it that from this study 
there may be derived also a guide for the happi- 
ness of human life. 

False knowledge reasons thus : " Men exist and 
have existed before us. Let us see how they have 

90 



FALSE DIRECTION OF LEARNING. q X 

existed, what changes have come about in their 
existence through time and situation, in what 
direction these changes point. From these his- 
torical alterations in their existence we shall dis- 
cover the law of their life.'* 

Not having in view the principal aim of learn- 
ing, the study of that rational law to which the 
personality of man must submit itself for his hap- 
piness, the so-called learned men of this category, 
by the very aim which they set themselves for 
their study, pronounce the condemnation on the 
futility of their study. 

In point of fact, if the existence of men alters 
only in consequence of the general laws of their 
animal existence, then the study of those laws, to 
which it is thus subjected, is utterly useless and 
vain. Whether men know or do not know about 
the law of change in their existence, this law is 
accomplished, exactly as the change is accom- 
plished in the life of moles and beavers, in conse- 
quence of those conditions in which they find 
themselves. 

But if it is possible for man to know that law 
of reason to which his life must be subservient, 
then it is evident that he can nowhere procure the 



92 L!FE - 

knowledge of that law of reason, except where it 
is revealed to him : in his rational consciousness. 
And therefore, however much men may have 
studied the subject of how men have existed like 
animals, they will never learn concerning the 
existence of man anything which would not have 
taken place of itself in men, without the acquire- 
ment of that knowledge. 

This is one category of the vain reasonings of 
men upon life, called historical and political 
science. 

Another category of reasonings, widely dissem- 
inated in our day, in which the only object of 
knowledge is utterly lost sight of, is as follows : — 

" Looking upon man, as an object of observa- 
tion," say the wise men, "we see that he is nour- 
ished, grows, reproduces his species, becomes old 
and dies, exactly like any other animal ; but some 
phenomena (psychical, as they are designated) 
prevent accuracy of observation, present too great 
complications, and hence, in order the better to 
understand man, we will first examine his life in 
simpler phenomena, similar to those which we see 
in animals and plants, which lack this psychical 
activity. 



FALSE DIRECTION OF LEARNING. 93 

1 

"With this aim, we will investigate the life of 
animals and plants in general. But, on investi- 
gating animals and plants, we see that in all of 
them there reveal themselves still more simple 
laws of matter, which are common to them all. 
And, as the laws of the animal are simpler than 
the laws of the life of man, and the laws of the 
plant simpler still, investigation must be based 
upon the simplest, upon the laws of matter. We 
see that what takes place in the plant and the 
animal is precisely what takes place in the man," 
say they, "and hence we conclude that everything 
which takes place in man we can explain to our- 
selves from what takes place in the very simplest 
dead matter, which is visible to us, and open to 
our investigations, the more so as all the peculiar- 
ities of the activity of man are found in constant 
dependence upon powers which act in matter. 
Every change of the matter constituting the body 
of man alters and infringes upon his whole ac- 
tivity." And hence, they conclude, the laws of 
matter are the cause of man's activity. But the 
idea that there is in man something which we do 
not see in animals or in plants, or in dead matter, 
and that this something is the only subject of 



94 LIFE ' 

knowledge, without which every other is useless, 
does not disturb them. 

It does not enter their heads that, if the change 
of matter in the body of man infringes upon his 
activity, — this merely proves that the change of 
matter is one of the causes which affects the 
activity of man, but not that the movement of 
matter is one of the causes of man's activity being 
interfered with, nor in the least that the move- 
ment of matter is the cause of his activity. Ex- 
actly as the injury done by the removal of earth 
from under the root of a plant proves that the 
earth may or may not be everywhere, but not that 
the plant is merely the product of the earth. And 
they study in man that which takes place also in 
dead matter, and in the plant, and in animals, 
assuming that an explanation of the laws, and the 
phenomena accompanying the life of man, can 
elucidate for them the life of man itself. 

In order to understand the life of man, that is to 
say, that law to which, for the happiness of man, 
his animal person must be subservient, men exam- 
ine either historical existence, but not the life of 
man, or the subservience, not acknowledged by 
man but only seen by him, of the animal and the 



FALSE DIRECTION OF LEARNING. 



95 



plant, and of matter, to various laws ; i. e., they do 
the same thing that men would do if they studied 
the situation of objects unknown to them, for the 
sake of finding that unknown aim which must be 
followed. 

It is perfectly true that the knowledge of the 
phenomenon visible to us, of the existence of man 
in history, may be instructive for us ; and that the 
study of the laws of the animal person of man and 
of other animals may be equally instructive for us, 
as well as the study of those laws to which matter 
is subject. The study of all this is important for 
man, since it shows him, as in a mirror, that 
which is infallibly accomplished in his life, but it 
is evident that this knowledge of that which is al- 
ready in process of accomplishment and visible to 
us, however full it may be, cannot furnish us with 
the chief knowledge, which is necessary to us, the 
knowledge of that law to which, for our happiness, 
our animal personality must be subservient. The 
knowledge of the laws that are accomplished is in- 
structive for us, but only when we acknowledge 
that law of reason to which our animal personality 
must be subservient, but not when that law is not 
recognized at all. 



96 LIFE - 

However well the tree may have studied (if it 
could but study) all those chemical and physical 
phenomena which take place in it, it can by no 
means, from these observations and from this 
knowledge, deduce for itself the necessity of col- 
lecting sap and of distributing it for the growth of 
the bole, the leaf, the flower, and the fruit. 

Precisely thus — man, however well he may 
know the law which guides his animal personality, 
and the laws which control matter, — these laws 
will afford him not the slightest guidance as to 
how he is to proceed with the bit of bread which 
is in his hands : whether he is to give it to his 
wife, to a stranger, to a dog, or to eat it himself, 
to defend this bit of bread or to give it to the 
person who shall ask him for it. ~But a man's life 
consists solely of the decision of these and similar 
questions. 

The study of laws which guide the existence of 
animals, plants, and matter is not only useful but 
indispensable for the elucidation of the law of the 
, life of man, but only when that study has as its 
chief aim the subject of man's knowledge: the 
elucidation of the law of reason. 

But on the assumption that the life of man is 



FALSE DIRECTION OF LEARNING. gy 

t 

merely his animal existence, and that the happiness 
indicated by rational consciousness is impossible, 
and that the law of reason is but a vision, — such 
study becomes not only vain but deadly, since it 
conceals from man the sole object of knowledge, 
and maintains him in the error that, by following 
up the reflection of the object, he can know the 
subject also. Such study is similar to that which 
a man should make by attentively studying all the 
changes and movements of the shadow of the liv- 
ing being, assuming that the cause of the move- 
ment of the living being is included in the 
changes and movements of its shadow. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE CAUSE OF FALSE KNOWLEDGE IS THE FALSE 
PERSPECTIVE IN WHICH OBJECTS PRESENT THEM- 
SELVES. 

"True knowledge consists in knowing that we 
know that which we know, and that we do not 
know that which we do not know," said Confucius. 

But false knowledge consists in thinking that we 
know that which we do not know ; and it is impos- 
sible to give a more accurate definition of that 
false lack of knowledge which reigns among us. 
It is assumed by the false knowledge of our day 
that we know that which we cannot know, and 
that we do not know that which alone we can 
know. It seems to a man possessed of false knowl- 
edge that he knows everything which presents it- 
self to him in space and time, and that he does not 
know that which is known to him through his ra- 
tional consciousness. 

To such a man it seems that happiness in gen- 
eral, and his happiness in particular, is the most 

98 



THE CAUSE OF FALSE KNOWLEDGE. gg 

t 

unfathomable of subjects for him. His reason 

and his rational consciousness seem to him as 
nearly the same unfathomable objects ; a little 
more comprehensible subject appears to be him- 
self as an animal ; still more comprehensible 
appear to him animals and plants, and more com- 
prehensible still seems dead, endlessly diffused 
matter. 

Something of the same sort takes place with 
man's vision. A man always unconsciously di- 
rects his sight chiefly on the objects which are 
more distant, and which therefore seem to him 
simple in color and outline, on the sky; the hori- 
zon, the far-off meadows, the forest. These ob- 
jects present themselves to him as better defined 
and more simple in proportion as they are more 
distant, and, vice versa, the nearer the object, the 
more complicated is it in outline and color. 

If man did not know how to compute the dis- 
tance of objects, he would not, as he looked, arrange 
objects in perspective, but would acknowledge the 
great simplicity and definiteness of outline and 
color, their greater degree of visibility ; and to 
such a man the interminable sky would appear the 
simplest and most visible, and then as less visible 



100 LIFE. 

objects would the more complicated outlines of 
the horizon appear to him, and still less visible 
would appear to him his own hands, moving before 
his face, and light would appear to him the most 
invisible of all. 

Is it not the same with the false knowledge of 
man? What is indubitably known to him — his 
rational consciousness — seems to him to be be- 
yond comprehension, while that which is, indubita- 
bly, unattainable for him — boundless and eternal 
matter — seems to him to be within the scope of 
knowledge, because on account of its distance 
from him it seems simple to him. 

But, surely, this is precisely the reverse. First 
of all, and most indubitably of all, every man 
can know and does know the happiness towards 
which he is striving ; then, as indubitably, he 
knows the reason, which points out to him that 
happiness, — he already knows that his animal 
part is subject to that reason, and he already 
sees, though he does not know, all the other phe- 
nomena which present themselves to him in space 
and time. 

Only to the man with a false idea of life does it 
seem that he knows objects better in proportion as 



THE CAUSE OF FALSE KNOWLEDGE. IO l 

they are more clearly defined by time and space : 
in point of fact, we know fully only that which is 
not defined by time or space : happiness and the 
law of reason. But we know external objects the 
less in proportion as our consciousness has less 
share in the knowledge, in consequence of which 
an object is defined only by its place in time and 
space. And hence, the more exclusively an object 
is defined by time and space, the less comprehen- 
sible is it to man. 

The true knowledge of man ends with the 
knowledge of his individuality — of the animal 
part. He actually knows himself in this animal, 
and knows himself not because he is something 
appertaining to time and space (on the contrary, 
he never can know himself as a phenomenon 
appertaining to time and space), but because he 
is something which must, for its own happiness, 
be subservient to the law of reason. He knows 
himself in this animal as something independent 
of time and space. 

When he questions himself as to his place in 
time and space, it seems to him, first of all, that 
he stands in the middle of time, which is endless 
on both sides of him, and that he is the centre of 



102 



LIFE. 



the sphere, whose surface is everywhere and no- 
where. And this self of his, exempt from time 
and space, man actually knows, and with this, his 
"ego" ends his actual knowledge. All that is 
contained outside of this, his " ego" man does 
not know, and he can only observe and define it 
in an external and conventional manner. 

Having departed, for a time, from the knowl- 
edge of himself, as a rational centre, striving 
towards happiness, i. e., as a being independent of 
time and space, man can, for a time, conditionally 
admit that he is part of the visible world, appear- 
ing in time and space. Regarding himself thus, 
in time and space, in connection with other beings, 
man combines his true inward knowledge of him- 
self with the external observations on himself, and 
receives of himself a conception of a man in gen- 
eral similar to all other men ; through this conven- 
tional knowledge of himself, man conceives of 
other men, also, a certain external idea, but he 
does not know them. 

The impossibility, for man, of true knowledge of 
men, proceeds also from the fact that of such men 
he sees not one but hundreds, thousands, and he 
knows that there have existed and that there will 



THE CAUSE OF FALSE KNOWLEDGE. 



103 



exist men whom he has never seen and whom he 
never will see. 

Beyond men, still further removed from himself, 
man beholds in time and space animals, differing 
from men and from each other. These creatures 
would be utterly incomprehensible to him, if he 
were not possessed of a knowledge of man in gen- 
eral ; but, having this knowledge, and deducing 
from his conception of man his rational conscious- 
ness, he receives some idea concerning animals 
also ; but this idea is for him less like knowl- 
edge than his idea of men in general. He be- 
holds a vast quantity of the most varied animals; 
and the greater their numbers, the less pos- 
sible, apparently, is any knowledge of them for 
him. 

Further removed from himself, he beholds 
plants, and the diffusion of these phenomena in 
the world is even greater, and knowledge of them 
is still more impossible for him. 

Still further from him, behind animals and 
plants, in space and time, man beholds bodies 
without life, and forms of matter which are but 
little or not at all distinguishable. Matter he un- 
derstands least of all. The knowledge of the 



104 LIFE ' 

forms of matter is already quite indistinguishable 
to him, and he not only does not know it, but he 
only imagines it to himself, the more so as matter 
already presents itself to him, in space and time, 
as endless. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE RECOGNIZABILITY OF OBJECTS IS AUGMENTED 
NOT ACCORDING TO THEIR MANIFESTATION IN 
SPACE AND TIME, BUT ACCORDING TO THE UNITY 
OF THE LAW WHERETO WE AND THOSE SUBJECTS 
WHICH WE STUDY ARE SUBSERVIENT. 

What can be more clear than the words : the 
dog is sick ; the calf is affectionate ; he loves me ; 
the bird rejoices ; the horse is afraid, a good man, 
a vicious animal ? And all these most important 
and comprehensible words are not defined by 
space and time ; on the contrary, the more in- 
comprehensible to us the law to which a phenom- 
enon is subservient, the more accurately is the 
phenomenon defined by time and space. Who 
will say that he understands that law of gravity 
in accordance with which the movements of the 
earth, moon, and sun take place ? Yet an eclipse 
of the sun is determined in the most accurate 
manner by space and time. 

We know fully only our life, our aspiration for 
i°5 



106 . LIFE - 

happiness and the reason which points us to that 
happiness. The knowledge which stands next to 
it in point of sureness is the knowledge of our 
animal personality, striving towards happiness and 
subservient to the law of reason. In the knowl- 
edge of our animal personality there already ap- 
pear conditions of time and space, visible, palpable, 
observable but not accessible to our understand- 
ing. After this, in point of sureness of knowledge, 
is the knowledge of animal personalities, similar to 
ourselves, in which we recognize an aspiration 
towards happiness, as well as a rational conscious- 
ness, in common with ourselves. In so far as the 
life of these personalities approaches the laws of 
our life, of aspiration towards happiness, and sub- 
mission to the law of reason, to that extent do we 
know them ; in so far as it reveals itself under 
conditions of time and space, to that extent we 
do not know them. Thus, more than in any 
other way, do we know man. 

The next thing in point of surety of knowledge 
is our knowledge of animals, in which we see a 
personality striving towards welfare, like our 
own, — though now we hardly recognize a sem- 
blance of our rational consciousness, — and with 



THE RECOGNIZABILITY OF OBJECTS. i J 
t 

which we cannot communicate through that 
rational consciousness. 

After animals, we behold plants, in which we 
with difficulty recognize a personality similar to 
our own, aspiring to happiness. These beings 
present themselves to y us chiefly in phenomena 
of time and space, and are hence still less ac- 
cessible to our knowledge. 

We know them only because in them we behold 
a personality, similar to our animal personality, 
which, equally with ours, aspires to happiness, 
and matter which subjects itself to the law of 
reason under the conditions of time and space. 

Still less accessible to our knowledge are im- 
personal, material objects ; in them we no longer 
find semblances of our personality, we perceive no 
striving at all after happiness, but we behold 
merely the phenomena of time and space of 
the laws of reason, to which they are subject. 

The genuineness of our knowledge does not 
depend upon the accessibility to observation of 
objects in time and space, but contrariwise ; the 
more accessible to observation the phenomena of 
the object in time and place, the less comprehen- 
sible is it to us. 



108 LIFE ° 

Our knowledge of the world flows from the 
consciousness of our striving after happiness, 
and of the necessity, for the attainment of this 
happiness, of the subjection of our animal part to 
reason. If we know the life of the animal, it 
is only because we behold in the animal a striv- 
ing towards happiness, and the necessity of sub- 
jection to the law of reason, which is represented 
in it by the law of organism. 

If we know matter, we know it only because, 
in spite of the fact that its happiness is incompre- 
hensible to us, we nevertheless behold in it the 
same phenomenon as in ourselves — the neces- 
sity of subjection to the law of reason, which 
rules it. 

We cannot know ourselves from the laws which 
rule animals, but w r e can know animals only by 
that law which we know in ourselves, and so 
much the less can we know ourselves from the 
laws of our life transferred to the phenomena of 
matter. 

All that man knows of the external world he 
knows only because he knows himself and in 
himself finds three different relations to the 
world : one relation of his rational conscious- 



THE RECOGNIZABILITY OF OBJECTS. i g 

i 
ness, another relation of his animal, and a third 

relation of the matter entering into his animal 
body. He knows in himself these three differ- 
ent relations, and therefore all that he sees in the 
world is always disposed before him in a per- 
spective of three planes, separate from each 
other : (i) rational beings ; (2) animals, and (3) 
lifeless matter. 

And, from knowledge of the laws of matter, as 
they think of it, we' can learn the law of organ- 
isms, and not from the laws of organism can we 
know ourselves as a rational creation, but vice 
versa. First of all we may and we must know 
ourselves, i. e., that law of reason to which, for 
our own happiness, our personality must be sub- 
ject, and only then can we and must we know 
also the law of our animal personality, and of 
other personalities like it, and, at a still greater 
distance from us, the laws of matter. 

The laws of matter seem peculiarly clear to 
us, only because they are uniform for us : and 
they are uniform for us because they are espe- 
cially far removed from the law of our life as 
we recognize it. 

The laws of organisms seem to us simpler than 



no 



LIFE. 



the law of our life, also on account of their dis- 
tance from us. But in them we merely observe 
laws, but we do not know them, as we know the 
law of our rational consciousness, which we must 
fulfil. 

We know neither the one being nor the other, 
but we merely see, we observe outside of our- 
selves. Only the law of our rational conscious- 
ness do we know indubitably, because it is nec- 
essary to our happiness, because we live by this 
consciousness ; we do not see it because we do 
not possess that highest point from which we 
might be able to observe it. 

Only, if there were higher beings subjecting 
our rational consciousness as our rational • con- 
sciousness subjects itself to our animal person- 
ality, and as our animal personality (our organ- 
ism) subjects matter to itself — these higher 
beings might behold our rational life as we be- 
hold our animal existence and the existence of 
matter. 

Human life presents itself as indissolubly bound 
up with two modes of existence, which it includes 
within itself : the existence of animals and plants 
(of organisms), and the existence of matter. 



THE RECOGNIZABILITY OF OBJECTS. m 

Man himself makes his real life, and lives it ; 
but in the two modes of existence bound up with 
his life, man cannot take part. .Body and matter, 
constituting him, exist of themselves. 

These forms of existence present themselves to 
man as though preceding the lives lived through, 
included in his life, as though reminiscences of 
former lives. 

In the real life of man, these two forms of ex- 
istence furnish him' with implements and mate- 
rials for his work, but not the work itself. 

It is useful for a man to learn thoroughly both 
the materials and the implements of his work. 
•The better he knows them, the better condition 
will he be in to work. The study of these forms 
of existence included within him, of his animal 
and the material constituting the animal, shows 
man, as though in a mirror, the universal law 
of all existence — submission to the law of rea- 
son, and is thereby confirmed in the necessity of 
subjecting his animal to its law ; but man cannot 
and must not confound the material and imple- 
ments of his work with the work itself. 

However much a man may have studied the 
visible, palpable life, observed by him in himself 



112 LIFE. 

and in others, which is fulfilled without any effort 
of his, this life will always remain a mystery to 
him ; he will never understand a life of which 
he is unconscious, and by observations upon this 
mysterious life, which is always hiding from him, 
in the infinity of space and time, he will be in no 
wise enlightened as to his real life, which is re- 
vealed to him in his consciousness and which 
consists in the subservience of his animal per- 
sonality, to the law of reason known to himself, 
and for the attainment of his entirely independent 
happiness. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE TRUE LIFE OF MAN IS NOT THAT WHICH 
TAKES PLACE IN SPACE AND TIME. 

Man knows life in himself as an aspiration 
towards happiness, "to be attained by the sub- 
mission of his animal personality to the law of 
reason. 

He does not and cannot know any other life of 
man. For the man recognizes the animal as 
Jiving, only when the matter constituting it is 
subject not only to its laws, but to the higher 
law of organism. 

There is in a certain conjunction of matter, sub- 
mission to the higher law of organism ; we recog- 
nize life in this conjunction of matter ; no, this 
submission has not begun, or ended ; and that 
does not yet exist, which distinguishes this matter 
from all other matter, in which act only mechani- 
cal, physical, and chemical laws, — and we do not 
recognize in it the life of the animal. 

"3 



II 4 LIFE. 

In precisely the same manner, we recognize 
people like ourselves, or even ourselves, as liv- 
ing only when our animal personality, in addi- 
tion to submission to the law of organism, is 
subservient to the higher law of our conscious- 
ness. 

As soon as there is none of this submission of 
the personality to the law of reason, as soon as 
the law of personality alone acts in man, subject- 
ing to itself the matter which constitutes it, we 
do not know and we do not see human life either 
in others or in ourselves, as we do not see the life 
of the animal in matter, which is subject only to 
its laws. 

However powerful and rapid may be a man's 
movements in delirium, in madness, in agony, in 
intoxication, in a burst of passion even, we do 
not recognize a man as alive, we do not bear our- 
selves to him as to a living man, and we recognize 
in him only the possibility of life. But, however 
weak and motionless a man may be, if we see that 
his animal personality is subservient to his reason, 
we recognize him as living, and bear ourselves 
towards him as such. 

We cannot understand man's life otherwise 



THE TRUE LIFE OF MAN. Ix ^ 

t 

than as the subjection of the animal personality 
to the law of reason. 

This life reveals itself under conditions of space 
and time, but is not denned by the conditions 
of space and time, but only according to the de- 
gree of subjection of the animal personality to the 
reason. Defining life by conditions of space and 
time is precisely the same as defining the height 
of an object by its length and breadth. 

The movement upward of an object, which is 
also moving on a plane surface, will furnish an 
accurate simile of the relationship of the true life 
of man to the life of the animal personality, or of 
the true life to the life of time and space. The 
movement of the object upwards does not depend 
upon its movement on a plane surface, and can be 
neither augmented nor diminished thereby. It is 
the same with the definition of the life of man. 
True life always reveals itself in personality, and 
does not depend upon and cannot be either aug- 
mented or diminished by this, that, or the other ex- 
istence of personality. 

The conditions of time and space, in which the 
animal personality of man finds itself, cannot 
wield influence over the true life, which consists 



n6 LIFE - 

of the submission of the animal personality to the 
rational consciousness. 

It is beyond the power of man, who desires life, 
to annihilate or arrest the movement of his exist- 
ence in time and space, but his true life is the at- 
tainment of happiness by submission to reason, 
independently of those visible movements of time 
and space. It is only in this increasing attain- 
ment of happiness, through submission to reason, 
that what constitutes the life of man consists. 
There is none of this augmentation in submission, 
and man's life proceeds in the two visible direc- 
tions of time and space, and is one existence. 
There is this upward movement, this greater and 
greater submission to reason, — and between two 
powers one relationship is established ; and more 
or less movement takes place in accordance with 
the resultant rising existence of man in the realm 
of life. 

The powers of time and space are definite, final, 
incompatible with the conception of life, but the 
power of aspiration towards good through submis- 
sion to reason is a power rising on high, the very 
power of life, for which there are no bounds of 
time or space. 



THE TRUE LIFE OF MAN. ny 

t 

Man imagines that his life comes to a stand-still 

and is divided, but these hindrances and hesita- 
tions are only an illusion of the consciousness 
(similar to the illusions of the external senses). 
Obstacles and hesitations there are not and there 
cannot be in real life : they only seem such to us 
because of our false view of life. Man begins to 
live with real life, i. e., he rises to a certain height 
above the animal life, and from this height he sees 
the shadowy nature of his animal existence, which 
infallibly ends in death ; he sees that his existence 
on a plane surface is encompassed on all sides by 
precipices, and, recognizing the fact that this as- 
cent on high is life itself, he is terrified by that 
which he has beheld. 

Instead of recognizing the power which has 
raised him to the heights of his life, and going in 
the direction revealed to him, he takes fright at 
what has been laid open before him from the 
heights, deliberately descends, and lies as low as 
possible, in order not to see the abysses yawning 
around him.* But the force of rational conscious- 
ness raises him once more, again he sees, again he 
takes fright, and again he falls to earth, in order to 
avoid seeing. And this goes on until he finally 



n8 LIFE ° 

recognizes the fact that, in order to save himself 
from terror before the movement of a pernicious 
life, he must understand that his movement on a 
plane surface — his existence in time and space — 
is not his life, but that his life consists only in the 
movement upward, that in the submission of his 
animal personality to the law of reason is the only 
possibility of life and happiness. He must under- 
stand that he has wings which raise him above the 
abyss ; that, were it not for those wings, he never 
would have mounted on high, and would not have 
beheld the abyss. He must believe in his wings, 
and soar whither they bear him. 

It is only from this lack of faith that proceed 
those phenomena which seem strange to him at 
first, of the fluctuation of true life, of its arrest, 
and the division of consciousness. 

Only to the man who understands his life in its 
animal existence, defined by time and space, does 
it appear that the rational consciousness has re- 
vealed itself at times in the animal creature. And, 
looking thus upon the revelation in himself of ra- 
tional consciousness, man asks himself when and 
under what conditions his rational consciousness 
revealed itself in him ? But, scrutinize his past as 



THE TRUE LIFE OF MAN. Y l g 

carefully as he will, man will never discover those 
times of revelation of the rational consciousness : 
it will always seem to him either that it has never 
existed, or that it has always existed. If it ap- 
pears to him that there have been gaps in rational 
consciousness, it is only because he- does not re- 
cognize the life of rational consciousness as life. 
Comprehending his life only as an animal exist- 
ence, determined by conditions of time and space, 
man tries to measure the awakening and activity 
of rational consciousness by the same measure : he 
asks himself, " When, for how long a time, under 
what conditions, did I find myself under the sway 
of rational consciousness ? " 

But the intervals between rational life exist only 
for the man who understands his life as the life of 
an animal personality. But for the man who un- 
derstands his life as consisting in the activity of 
the rational consciousness — there can exist none 
of these intervals. 

Rational life exists. It alone does exist. In- 
tervals of time of one minute or of fifty thousand 
years are indistinguishable by it, because for it 
time does not exist. 

The true life of man from which he forms for 



120 



LIFE. 



himself an idea of every other life, is the aspiration 
towards happiness, attainable by the subjection of 
his personality to the law of reason. Neither 
reason nor the degree of his submission to it are 
determined by either time or space. 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE RENUNCIATION OF HAPPINESS ON THE PART 
OF THE ANIMAL PERSONALITY IS THE LAW OF 

man's LIFE. 

Life is a striving towards good. 1 A striving 
towards good is life. Thus all men have under- 
stood, do understand, and always will understand 
life. And hence the life of man is an aspiration 
towards the good, or happiness of man, and an 
aspiration towards the good of man is human life. 
The common herd, unthinking men, understand 
the welfare of man to lie in the welfare of his 
animal part. 

False science excludes the conception of happi- 
ness from the definition of life, understands life 
in its animal existence, and hence it sees the 
happiness of life only in animal welfare, and 
agrees with the error of the masses. 

In both cases, the error arises from confound- 
ing the individualities, as science calls them, with 

1 Blago, good, happiness, welfare. 

121 



122 LIFE > 

rational consciousness. Rational consciousness 
includes individuality in itself. But individual- 
ity does not always include in itself rational con- 
sciousness. Individuality is a property of the 
animal, and of man as well as of the animal. 
Rational consciousness is the property of man 
alone. 

The animal may live for his own body only ; 
nothing prevents his living thus, he satisfies his 
individual and unconsciously plays his part, and 
does not know that he is an individual, but 
reasoning man cannot live for his own body 
alone. He cannot live thus because he knows 
that he is an individual, and therefore knows that 
other people are individuals also, as well as him- 
self, and he knows all that must result from the 
relations of these individuals. 

If man aspired only to the good of his individu- 
ality, if he loved only himself, — his own individual- 
ity, — he would not know that other beings love 
themselves also, any more than animals know 
this ; but if man knows that he is a personality, 
striving towards the same thing as all the persons 
surrounding him, he can no longer strive for what 
is evidently evil for his rational consciousness, and 



THE LAW OF MAN'S LIFE. j 2 $ 

his life can no longer consist in striving for his 
individual welfare. 

It merely seems to man, at times, that his aspi- 
ration towards good has, for its object, the satis- 
faction of the demands of the animal personality. 
This delusion arises from the fact that man takes 
that which he sees proceeding in his animal part, 
for the activity of his rational consciousness. 
What results is something in the nature of what 
would take place if: a man were to govern himself, 
in a waking state, by what he had seen in dreams. 
And if this delusion is upheld by false teachings, 
there results in man a confounding of his person- 
ality with his rational consciousness. 

But his rational consciousness always shows 
man that the satisfaction of the demands of his 
animal personality cannot constitute his happi- 
ness, and hence his life, and therefore it draws 
him irresistibly towards that happiness, hence to- 
wards the life which is peculiar to him, and it does 
not become confused with his animal personality. 

It is generally thought and said that renuncia- 
tion of the welfare of personality is a deed worthy 
of man. Renunciation of the welfare of person- 
ality is not a merit, is not an exploit, but an indis- 



124 LIFE - 

pensable condition of the life of man. At the 
same time that man recognizes himself as an 
individual, separated from all the world, he also 
recognizes other individuals separated from all 
the world, and their mutual connection, and the 
transparency of the welfare of his personality, and 
the sole actuality of happiness to be only of such 
a sort as may be satisfied by his rational con- 
sciousness. 

In the case of an animal, activity which does 
not have for its object its individual welfare, but 
is directly opposed to that welfare, is renunciation 
of life ; but in the case of man, it is precisely the 
reverse. The activity of man, directed solely to 
the attainment of individual happiness, is a com- 
plete renunciation of the life of man. 

For the animal, who has no rational conscious- 
ness to demonstrate to him the poverty and lim- 
ited character of his existence, personal happiness, 
and the reproduction of its species therefrom 
resulting, constitute the highest aim of life. But 
for man, personality is merely that step in exist- 
ence with which the true happiness of his life, 
which is not synonymous with the happiness of 
his personality, is revealed to him. 



THE LAW OF MAN'S LIFE. I2 5 

• 

The consciousness of individuality is not life for 

man, but that boundary from which his life, con- 
sisting in ever greater and greater attainment to 
the happiness which is proper to him, and which 
does not depend upon the happiness of his animal 
part, begins. 

According to the prevalent conception of life, 
human life is the fragment of time from the birth 
to the death of his animal part. But this is not 
human life; this is' merely the existence of man 
as an animal personality. But human life is 
something which only reveals itself in the ani- 
mal existence, just as organic life is something 
which only reveals itself in the existence of 
matter. 

First of all, the apparent objects of man's per- 
sonality present themselves to him as the objects 
of his life. These objects are visible, and hence 
they seem to be comprehensible. 

But the aims pointed out to him by his rational 
consciousness seem incomprehensible, because 
they are invisible to him. And man, at first, 
passionately repulses the visible and yields him- 
self to the invisible. 

To a man perverted by the false teachings of 



126 LIFE. 

the world, the demands of the animal which fulfil 
themselves, and which are visible both in himself 
and in others, seem simple and clear, but the new, 
invisible requirements of rational consciousness 
present themselves as conflicting ; the satisfaction 
of them, which is not accomplished by them- 
selves, but which a man must himself attend to, 
seem, in some way, complicated and indistinct. It 
is painful and alarming to renounce the visible 
representation of life and yield one's self to its 
invisible consciousness, as it would be painful 
and alarming to a child to be born, were he able 
to feel his birth, but there is nothing to be done 
when it is evident that the visible representation 
leads to death, while the invisible consciousness 
alone gives life. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE ANIMAL PERSONALITY IS THE INSTRUMENT OF 
LIFE. 

Surely, no arguments can conceal from man 
this patent and indubitable truth, that his per- 
sonal existence is something which is constantly 
perishing, hasting on to death, and that there can 
be, therefore, no life in his animal person. 

Man cannot avoid seeing that the existence of 
his personality from birth and childhood to old 
age and death is nothing else than a constant 
waste and diminution of this animal personality, 
ending in inevitable death ; and hence, the con- 
sciousness of one's life in personality, including in 
itself a desire for enlargement and indestructibility 
of personality, cannot be otherwise than uninter- 
rupted contradiction and suffering, cannot be 
otherwise than evil, while the only sense of his 
life lies in its aspiration towards good. 

In whatever the genuine happiness of man con- 
127 



128 LIFE. 

sists, renunciation of the happiness of his animal 
person is inevitable for him. 

Renunciation of animal happiness is the law of 
man's life ; if it is not accomplished freely, ex- 
pressing itself in submission to rational conscious- 
ness, then it is accomplished violently in every 
man at the fleshly death of his animal, when, in 
consequence of the burden of suffering, he desires 
but one thing : to escape from the torturing con- 
sciousness of a perishing personality, and to pass 
into another form of existence. 

Entrance into life, and the life of man, is similar 
to that which takes place with the horse, whom 
his master leads forth from the stable and har- 
nesses. It seems to the horse, on emerging from 
the stable and beholding the light, and scenting 
liberty, that in that liberty is life, but he is har- 
nessed and driven off. He feels a weight behind 
him, and if he thinks that his life consists in run- 
ning at liberty, he begins to kick, falls down, and 
sometimes kills himself. But if he does not kick, 
he has but two alternatives left to him : either he 
will go his way and drag his load, and discover 
that the burden is not heavy, and trotting not a 
torment, but a joy; or else he will kick himself 



THE INSTRUMENT OF LIFE. 



129 



free, and then Ris master will lead him to the 
tread-mill, and will fasten him by his halter, the 
wheel will begin to turn beneath him, and he will 
walk in the dark, in one place, suffering, but his 
strength will not be wasted ; he will perform his 
unwilling labor, and the law will be fulfilled in 
him. The only difference will lie in this, that the 
first work will be joyful, but the second compul- 
sory and painful. 

" But to what purpose this personality, whose 
happiness I am bound to renounce, in order to 
receive life?" say men, who accept their animal 
existence as life, "but for what purpose is this 
consciousness of individuality, which is opposed 
to the revelation of his true life, given to man ? " 
This question may be answered by a similar ques- 
tion which might be put by the animal, striving 
towards his aims, the preservation of his life and 
species. 

" Why," it might ask, " this matter and its laws, 
mechanical, physical, chemical, and others, with 
which I must contend in order to attain my ends ? 
If my calling,", the animal would say, " be the 
accomplishment of animal life, then why all these 
obstacles, which must be overcome ? " 



130 LIFE. 

It is clear to us that all matter and its laws, 
with which the animal contends, and which it 
subjugates to itself for the accomplishment of its 
animal existence, are not obstacles but means for 
the attainment of its ends. Only by working over 
matter, and by means of its laws, does the animal 
live. It is precisely the same in the life of man. 
His animal personality, in which man finds him- 
self, and which he is called upon to subject to hif 
rational consciousness, is no obstacle, but a means 
whereby he attains the aim of his happiness; his 
animal personality is, for man, that instrument 
with which he works. Animal existence is, for 
man, the spade given to a rational being in order 
that he may dig with it, and, as he digs, dull and 
sharpen it, and wear it out, but not to be polished up 
and laid away This talent is given to him to in- 
crease, and not to hoard. " And whoso saveth his 
life shall lose it. And he that loseth his life, for 
my sake, shall find it." 

In these words it is declared that we must not 
save but lose, and lose unceasingly; and that only 
by renouncing what is destined to perish, our 
animal personality, shall we acquire our true life, 
which will not and cannot perish. It is declared 



THE INSTRUMENT OF LIFE. ^j 

that our true life will begin only when we cease 
to count as life that which was not and could not 
be our life — our animal existence. It is declared 
that he who will save the spade which he has for 
the preparation of his food, to sustain his life, — 
that he, having saved his spade, shall lose his food 
and his life. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

BIRTH IN THE SPIRIT. 

"Ye must be born anew," said Christ. It is 
not that any one has commanded man to be born, 
but that man is inevitably led to it. In order to 
see life, he must be born again, into that existence 
through rational consciousness. 

Rational consciousness is bestowed upon man, 
in order that he may fix life in that happiness 
which is revealed to him by his rational conscious- 
ness. He who has fixed his life in that happiness 
has life ; but he who does not place his life there- 
in, but in his animal personality, thereby deprives 
himself of life. In this consists the definition of 
life given by Christ. 

Men who accept as life their aspiration towards 
happiness hear these words, and not only do not 
admit them, but do not understand and cannot 
understand them. These words seem to them to 
mean nothing, or very little, as designating some 

132 



BIRTH IN THE SPIRIT. ^3 

sentimental ancUmystical mood, which has been 
let loose upon them. They cannot understand the 
significance of these words, which furnish the 
explanation of a condition which is inaccessible to 
them, just as a dry seed which has not sprouted 
could not understand the condition of a moist and 
already growing seed. For the dry seeds, that 
sun which shines in these words upon the seed 
which is being born into life is only an insignifi- 
cant accident, — something large and warm and 
light ; but for the sprouting seed it is the cause 
of birth and life. Just the same, for those people 
who have not yet reached the inward inconsis- 
tency of animal personality and rational conscious- 
ness, the light of the sun of reason is but an 
insignificant accident, but sentimental, mystical 
words. The sun leads to life only those in whom 
life has already been engendered. 

No one has ever learned how it is engendered ; 
why, when, and where, not only in men but in 
animals and plants. Of its origin in man, Christ 
has said that no one knows or can know it. And, 
in fact, what can a man know about the manner 
in which life is engendered within him ? Life is 
the light of men, the beginning cf all things ; how 



134 



LIFE. 



can man know when it is engendered ? That does 
not live, which is engendered and perishes for 
man, and is revealed in space and time. But true 
life is, and therefore it cannot either begin or 
perish. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE DEMANDS OF RATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Yes, rational consciousness indubitably, incon- 
trovertibly says to man that, with the constitution 
of the world which he sees from his personality, 
he, his personality, can have no happiness. His 
life is a desire for happiness for himself, for him- 
self in particular, and he sees that this happiness 
is impossible. But, strange to say, in spite of the 
fact that he undoubtedly perceives that this hap- 
piness is impossible for him, he still lives in the 
one desire for this impossible happiness — happi- 
ness for himself alone. 

A man with an awakened (only awakened) ra- 
tional consciousness, which has not yet, however, 
subjected to itself his animal personality, if he 
does not kill himself, lives only for the purpose of 
realizing that impossible happiness ; the man lives 
and acts only in order that happiness may be his 
alone, in order that all people, and even all 

J35 



136 



LIFE. 



animals, should live and work to the end that his 
welfare alone may be provided for, that he may 
enjoy himself, that for him there may be no 
suffering and no death. 

One surprising point : in spite of the fact that 
his experience and observation of life, the life .of 
all about him, and his reason, indubitably point 
out to each man the inaccessibility of this, show 
him that it is impossible to make other living 
beings cease to love themselves, and love him 
alone, — in spite of this, the life of each man con- 
sists only in this, — by means of wealth, power, 
honor, glory, flattery, deceit, in some manner or 
other, to compel other beings to live not for them- 
selves, but for him alone ; to force all beings to 
love not themselves, but him alone. 

Men have done and do everything that they can 
for this object, and at the same time they see that 
they are attempting the impossible. " My life is 
a striving after happiness," says man to himself. 
" Happiness is possible for me only when all shall 
love me more than themselves, and all creatures 
love only themselves — hence ail that I do to 
make them love me is useless. It is useless and I 
can do nothing more." 



DEMANDS OF RATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. i$y 

Centuries- pass,: men learn the distance from 
the planets, determine their weight, learn the 
structure of the sun and stars, but the question as 
to how to reconcile the demands of personal hap- 
piness with the life of the world, which excludes 
the possibility of that happiness, remains for the 
majority of men as insoluble a problem as it was 
for men five thousand years ago. 

Rational consciousness says to every man : 
"Yes, thou must have happiness, but only on con- 
dition that all will love thee more than them- 
selves." And the same rational consciousness 
demonstrates to men that this cannot be, because 
they all love themselves alone. And therefore the 
only happiness which is opened to men by rational 
consciousness is closed to him again by it. 

Centuries pass, and the puzzle as to the happi- 
ness of man's life still remains for the majority of 
men insoluble. But, the problem has been solved 
long ago. And it always seems astonishing to all 
who have learned the solution of the riddle, that 
they have not themselves solved it, — it seems as 
though they had known it long ago and had merely 
forgotten it ; so simply and voluntarily does the 
solution of that riddle, which seemed so difficult 



I38 LIFE. 

amid the false teachings of our world, offer itself. 

Dost thou wish that all should live for thee, 
that all should love thee better than themselves ? 
There is only one condition in which thy desire 
can be fulfilled — namely, that all creatures should 
live for the good of others, and should love 
others better than themselves. Then only canst 
thou and all creatures be loved by all, and then 
only canst thou, among their number, receive that 
happiness which thou desirest. But if happiness 
be possible for thee only when all creatures love 
others better than themselves, then thou, a living 
creature, must love other creatures more than 
thyself. 

Only under these conditions are the happiness 
and life of man possible, and only under these 
conditions is that annihilated which has poisoned 
the life of man, — that the strife of beings, the 
torment of suffering, and the fear of death will be 
annihilated. 

What, in fact, has constituted the impossibility 
of personal existence ? In the first place, the 
strife among themselves of beings in search of 
their personal happiness. In the second, the 
delusion of enjoyment which leads life to waste, 



DEMANDS OF RATIONAL COA r SCIOUSNESS. i^g 

to satiety, to suffering, and, in the third, — death. 
But it is worth while to admit mentally that man 
replaces the striving for his own personal happi- 
ness by a striving for the happiness of other 
beings, in order that the impossibility of happiness 
may be annihilated, and that happiness may pre- 
sent itself as attainable to man. Looking upon 
the world from his idea of life, as a striving after 
personal happiness, man has beheld in the world 
a senseless conflict of beings engaged in destroy- 
ing each other. But it is only requisite that man 
should recognize the fact that his life lies in a 
striving after the good of others, in order to see 
the world in quite a different light ; to behold, side 
by side with chance phenomena of the strife of 
beings, a constant, mutual service of each other by 
these beings, — a service without which the exis- 
tence of the world is inconceivable. 

All that is necessary is to admit this and all 
previous senseless activity, directed towards the 
unattainable happiness of individuals, will be re- 
placed by another activity, in conformity with the 
law of the world and directed to the attainment of 
the greatest possible happiness for one's self and 
the whole world. 



140 LIFE. 

Another <;ause of the poverty of personal life, 
and of the impossibility of happiness for man, has 
been the deceitfulness of personal enjoyments, 
which waste life, and lead to satiety and suffer- 
ings. A man need only mentally admit that his 
life consists in a striving after the good of others, 
and the delusive thirst for enjoyments will cease ; 
and the vain, painful activity, directed to the fill- 
ing of the bottomless cask of animal personality, 
will be replaced by an activity engaged in main- 
taining the life of other beings, which is in har- 
mony with the laws of reason indispensable for his 
happiness, and the torture of personal suffering, 
which annihilates the activity of life, will be 
replaced by a feeling of sympathy for others, in- 
fallibly evoking fruitful activity which is also the 
most joyful. 

A third cause of the poverty of personal life has 
been the fear of death. Man has but to admit 
that his life does not consist in the happiness of 
his animal personality, but in the happiness of 
other beings, and the bugbear of death vanishes 
forever from before his eyes. For the fear of 
death arises only from the fear of losing the hap- 
piness of life with its death in the flesh. But if a 



DEMANDS OF RATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. I4I 

man could place his happiness in the happiness of 
other beings, i. e., if he would love them more than 
himself, then death would not represent to him 
that discontinuance of happiness and life, such as 
it does represent to a man who lives only for him- 
self. Death, to the man who should live only, for 
others, could not seem to be a cessation of happi- 
ness and life, because the happiness and the life 
of other beings is not only not interrupted with 
the life of a man who saves them, but is frequently 
augmented and heightened by the sacrifice of his 
life. 

" But that is not life," replies the troubled and 
erring consciousness of man. " That renunciation 
of life is suicide." — "I know nothing about that," 
replies rational consciousness, — "I know that 
such is the life of man and that there is no other, 
and that there can be no other. I know more 
than that, I know that such a life is life and happi- 
ness both for a man and for all the world. I know 
that, according to my former view of the world, my 
life and the life of every living being was an evil 
and without sense ; but according to this view, it 
appears as the realization of that law of reason 
which is placed in man. 



142 LIFE - 

"I know that the greatest happiness of the life 
of every being, which is capable of being infinitely 
enhanced, can be attained only through this law of 
the service of each to all, and, hence, of all to each." 

" But, if this can exist as an imaginary law, it 
cannot exist as an actual law," replies the per- 
turbed and erring consciousness of man. " Others 
do not now love me more than themselves, and 
therefore I cannot love them more than myself, 
and deprive myself of enjoyment, and subject my- 
self to suffering, for their sakes. I have nothing 
to do with the law of reason ; I desire enjoyment 
for myself, and freedom from suffering. But a 
strife is now in progress between men, and if I do 
not struggle also, the others will crush me. It 
makes no difference to me by what road in imag- 
ination the greatest success for all is attained — 
all I need at present is my own actual greatest 
happiness," says false consciousness. 

" I know nothing about that," replies rational 
consciousness. " I only know that what thou 
callest enjoyment will only become happiness 
for thee, when thou shalt not thyself take, but 
when others shall give of theirs to thee, and 
thy enjoyments will become superfluous and suf- 



DEMANDS OF RATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, i^ 

ferings, as they how are, only when thou shalt 
seize them for thyself. Only then, also, shalt thou 
free thyself from actual suffering, when others 
shall release thee from them, and not thou, thy- 
self — as now, when, through fear of imaginary 
sufferings, thou deprivest thyself of life itself. 

" I know that an individual life, a life where it 
is indispensable that all should love me alone, and 
that I shall love only myself, and in which I shall 
receive as much enjoyment as possible, and free 
myself from suffering and death, is the greatest 
and most incessant suffering. The more I love 
myself and strive with others, the more will others 
hate me and the more viciously will they struggle 
with me ; the more I hedge myself in from suffer- 
ing, the more torturing will it become, and the 
more I guard myself against death, the more terri- 
ble will it become. 

" I know that, whatever a man may do, he will 
attain to no happiness until he lives in harmony 
with the law of his life. But the law of his life is 
not contest but, on the contrary, the mutual ser- 
vice of individuals to each other." 

" But I know life only in my own person. It is 
impossible for me to place my life in the happiness 
of other persons." 



144 LIFE ' 

" I know nothing about that," replies rational 
consciousness, " I only know that my life and the 
life of the world, which has hitherto seemed to me 
malicious nonsense, now appear to me as one 
rational whole, alive and striving towards the 
same happiness, through submission to one and 
the same law of reason, which I know in myself." 

" But this is impossible to me," says erring con- 
sciousness, and at the same time there is not a 
man who would not have done this impossible 
thing, who would not have placed in this impossi- 
bility the best happiness of his life. 

" It is impossible to place one's happiness in 
the happiness of other beings," yet there is no 
man who has not known a condition in which the 
happiness of beings independent of himself has 
become his happiness. 

" It is impossible to place one's happiness in 
labors and sufferings for others," but a man ndfed 
only yield to that feeling of compassion, and per- 
sonal pleasures lose their sense for him, and the 
force of his life is transferred into toils and suffer- 
ings for the happiness of others, and these suffer- 
ings and toils become happiness for him. 

" It is impossible to sacrifice one's life for the 



DEMAXDS OF RATIOXAL COXSCIOUSXESS. \^ 

happiness of others," but a man need only recog- 
nize this feeling-, and death is not only no longer 
visible and terrible to him, but it appears as the 
highest bliss to which he can attain. 

A reasoning man cannot fail to see that if we 
mentally admit the possibility of replacing the 
striving for his own happiness, with a striving for 
the happiness of other beings, his life will become 
rational and happy, instead of senseless and pov- 
erty-stricken as before. 

He cannot fail, also, to see that, by admitting 
the same conception of life in other people and 
beings, the life of the whole world, in place of 
the incoherence and harshness which were form- 
erly apparent, will become that rational, elevated 
happiness which alone man can desire, in place of 
its former incoherence and aimlessness, and that 
it will acquire for him a rational meaning ; to such 
a man the aim of life appears as the infinite en- 
lightenment and union of beings in the world, 
towards which life leads, and in which men first, 
and afterwards all other beings, submitting them- 
selves ever more and more to the light of reason, 
will understand (what is at present granted to man 
alone to understand) that the happiness of life is 



146 LIFE - 

to be attained, not by the striving of each being 
towards his own personal happiness, but a united 
striving of each creature for the good of all the 
rest. 

But this is not all : in the mere possibility of 
a change of aspiration towards one's own per- 
sonal happiness, into an aspiration for the good of 
other beings, man cannot fail to perceive, also, 
that his gradual, ever increasing renunciation of 
his individuality, and transference of the object 
of his activity from himself to other beings, is all 
a movement in advance of mankind, and of those 
living beings which stand nearest to man. 

Man cannot but see in history that the move- 
ment of life in general lies not in the growth and 
augmentation of the strife between beings among 
themselves, but, on the contrary, in the diminu- 
tion of disagreement and in the mitigation of the 
strife ; that the movement of life consists only in 
this, that the world, through submission to the 
law of reason, passes from enmity and discord 
ever more towards concord and unity. 

Having admitted this, man cannot but see that 
those who have been in the habit of slaying pris- 
oners and their children cease to slay them ; that 



DEMANDS OF RATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, i^y 

warriors who hav*e taken pride in murder are ceas- 
ing to take pride in it ; that people who have been 
in the habit of killing animals are beginning to 
tame them, and to kill them less ; they are begin- 
ning to subsist on the eggs and milk of animals, 
instead of upon their bodies ; that they are begin- 
ning to restrain their destructiveness, even in the 
world of plants. 

A man perceives that the best representatives 
of mankind condemn researches for gratification, 
exhort men to abstinence, and that the very best 
men, who are lauded by posterity, present exam- 
ples of the sacrifice of their own existences for the 
good of others. Man perceives that that which 
he has only admitted at the demand of reason is 
the very thing which actually takes place in the 
world, and is confirmed by the past life of man- 
kind. 

But this is not all : more powerfully and con- 
vincingly than through either reason or history, 
and from quite a different source, as it were, does 
the aspiration of man's heart reveal itself to him, 
impelling him to immediate happiness ; to that 
very activity which his reason has pointed out to 
him, and which is expressed in his heart by love. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE DEMANDS OF THE INDIVIDUAL APPEAR IN- 
COMPATIBLE WITH THE DEMANDS OF RATIONAL 
CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Reason and judgment and history and his 
inward feeling, — all, it would appear, should con- 
vince a man of the justice of this conception of 
life; but to the man educated in the doctrines 
of the world it appears, nevertheless, as though 
the satisfaction of the demands of his rational 
consciousness could not be the law of his life. 

" Not contend with others for one's personal 
happiness, not seek enjoyment, not ward off suf- 
fering, and not fear death ! But that is impossi- 
ble, that is equivalent to renouncing the whole of 
life ! And how am I to renounce my individual- 
ity, when I feel the demands of my individual 
self, and when I know, by my reason, the legiti- 
macy of these demands ? " say the cultivated men 
of our world, with full conviction. 
148 



INCOMPATIBLE DEMANDS. j^g 

And here is a noteworthy phenomenon. La- 
boring men, simple men, who exercise their judg- 
ment but little, hardly ever defend the demands 
of individuality, and always feel in themselves 
demands opposed to the demands of personality ; 
but an almost complete denial of the demands of 
rational consciousness and, chief of all, a refuta- 
tion of the legality of those demands and a 
defence of the rights of the individual are to be 
met with only among wealthy, refined people with 
cultivated judgment. 

The cultivated, enervated, idle man will always 
prove that individuality has its inalienable rights. 
The hungry man will not demonstrate that a man 
must eat, he knows that every one knows that, 
and that it is impossible either to prove or to con- 
trovert it ; he will only eat. 

This arises from the fact that the simple, so- 
called uncultivated man, having toiled all his life 
with his body, has not perverted his judgment, 
but has preserved it in all its purity and force. 

But the man who has thought all his life, not 
only of insignificant, trivial objects, but even of 
such things as it is unnatural for a man to think 
of, has perverted his mind ; his mind is no longer 



150 LIFE. 

untrammelled. His mind is occupied with mat- 
ter which is foreign to it, with a consideration of 
the requirements of its individual, — with the 
development, the augmentation of them, and with 
devising means to gratify them. 

" But I am conscious of the demands of my 
individuality, and therefore those demands are 
legitimate," say so-called men of culture, brought 
up in the teachings of the world. 

And it is impossible for them not to feel the 
demands of their personality. The whole life of 
these people is directed towards the imaginary 
satisfaction of the happiness of the individual. 
But this happiness of the individual seems to 
them to lie in the gratification of wants. And 
they call all those conditions of the existence of 
the individual upon which they have bent their 
minds, wants. But the wants recognized — those 
upon which the mind is bent — always grow to 
unlimited dimensions, in consequence of this 
recognition. But the satisfaction of these wants 
veils from them the wants of their real life. 

Social science, so-called, places at the founda- 
tion of its investigations the doctrine of the 
requirements of man, forgetful of the circum- 



INCOMPATIBLE DEMANDS. jtjj 

stance, very inconvenient for this doctrine, that 
no man has any wants at all, like the man who 
commits suicide or the man who is dying with 
hunger, or that they are literally innumerable. 

There are as many requirements for the exist- 
ence of the animal man as there are sides to that 
existence, and these sides are as numerous as the 
radii in a sphere. Need oi food, of drink, of 
breathing, of the exercise of all the muscles 
and nerves ; need of labor, of rest, of pleasure, of 
family life ; need of science, of art, of religion, 
of their diversity. Needs, in all these connec- 
tions, of the child, the youth, the man, the old 
man, the young girl, the woman, the aged crone, 
the wants of the Chinese, the Parisian, the Rus- 
sian, the Laplander. Needs corresponding to the 
customs of the race, and to maladies. . . . 

One might go on enumerating them to the end 
of his days, without enumerating all in which the 
wants of the individual existence of man might 
exist. All the conditions of existence may be 
wants, and the conditions of existence are innu- 
merable. 

Only those conditions which are recognized are 
called wants. But recognized conditions, as soon 



152 LIFE - 

as they are recognized, lose their true meaning, 
and acquire that always exaggerated meaning 
which is given to them by the mind directed 
upon them* and which veils from it its true life. 

What are called needs, i. e., the conditions of 
man's animal existence, may be compared with 
countless little balls which are capable of being 
inflated, of which some body or other should have 
been formed. All the little spheres are equal to 
each other, and have their own places and are not 
impeded in any way. As long as they are not in- 
flated, all their wants are equal, and have room, and 
they do not feel painful until they are recognized. 
But all that is necessary is to begin to inflate one 
sphere, and it will occupy more space than all the 
rest, it will crowd the rest, and be crowded itself. 
It is the same with wants : all that is required is 
to direct the rational consciousness upon one of 
them, and this recognized want takes possession 
of its whole life and makes the man's whole being 
surfer. 



CHAPTER XX. 

WHAT IS REQUIRED IS, NOT RENUNCIATION OF IN- 
DIVIDUALITY, BUT ITS SUBJECTION TO RATIONAL 
CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Yes, the assertion that man does not feel the 
wants of his rational consciousness, but feels only 
the wants of his individual part, is nothing else 
than an assertion that our animal desires, to the 
satisfaction of which we have devoted all our 
mind, rule us, and have hidden from us our true 
life as men. The weeds of our thickly grown 
vices have stifled the germs of true life. 

And how can it be otherwise in our world, when 
it has been admitted and is admitted, by those who 
consider themselves teachers of others, that the 
highest perfection of the isolated man is the devel- 
opment on all sides of the refined wants of his 
personality, that the happiness of the masses lies 
in this, that they should have many wants, and 
that they should be able to satisfy them, that the 
153 



i 5 4 LIFE - 

happiness of men consists in gratifying their 
wants. 

How can men reared in such a doctrine do other- 
wise than affirm that they do not feel the wants of 
rational consciousness, but feel only the wants of 
the individual ? And how are they to feel the 
wants of reason when their entire mind, without 
reservation, has gone to the increase of their car- 
nal desires ? and how are they to renounce the 
demands of their desires when these desires have 
swallowed up their whole life ? 

" The renunciation of individuality is impossi- 
ble," these people generally say, endeavoring in- 
tentionally to turn the question, and placing, in- 
stead of an idea of the subjection of the individu- 
ality to the law of reason, the idea of the renun- 
ciation of it. 

" It is unnatural," they say, " and therefore im- 
possible." But no one is talking about renouncing 
individuality. Individuality is, to the rational man, 
the same that breath, the circulation of blood, is to 
the animal. How is the animal personality to re- 
nounce the circulation of its blood ? It is impos- 
sible to discuss this. Equally impossible is it to 
talk to the rational man about renouncing; individ- 



WHAT IS REQUIRED. l ^ 

uality. Individuality is, for the reasoning man, as 
indispensable a condition of his life as the circula- 
tion of the blood is a condition of the existence of 
his animal individuality. 

Individuality, as an animal individuality, cannot 
present and does not present any wants. These 
wants are presented by a falsely directed mind ; a 
mind directed not to a guidance of life, not to its 
enlightenment, but to the inflation of the carnal de- 
sires of individuality. 

The wants of the animal are always satisfied. 
Man cannot say, " What shall I eat ?" or " Where- 
withal shall I be clothed ? " All these wants are 
guaranteed to man, as to the animal and the bird, 
if he lives a rational life. And, in fact, who, be- 
ing a thinking man, can believe that he could di- 
minish the wretchedness of his position by the 
guarantee of his individuality ? 

The wretchedness of man's existence arises, not 
from the fact that he is an individual, but from the 
fact that he recognizes the existence of his individ- 
uality as life and happiness. Only then do contra- 
diction, division, and the suffering of man make 
their appearance. 

The sufferings of the man begin only when he 



156 LIFE, 

employs the force of his mind in the strengthen- 
ing and augmentation to an unlimited extent of 
the growing wants of his individual, for the sake 
of concealing from himself the demands of reason. 

It is neither possible nor necessary to renounce 
individuality, any more than in the case of all 
those conditions under which man exists ; but he 
neither can nor must admit these conditions as life 
itself. He may and ought to make use of the 
given conditions of life, but it is impossible to 
look, and he must not look, upon these conditions 
as upon the aim of life. It is not necessary to 
renounce individuality, but to renounce the happi- 
ness of the individual, to cease to recognize the 
individual as life : this is what man must do in or- 
der to return to unity, and in order that that hap- 
piness, the striving towards which constitutes his 
life, may be attainable to him. 

"Yes, but what is this ? This is Buddhism?" 
say the people of our day, as a rule, in reply to 
this. "This is Nirvana, this is standing on a 
pillar." And when they have said this, it seems 
to the people of our day that they have overthrown 
in the most successful manner what all know very 
well, and which it is impossible to conceal from 



WHAT IS REQUIRED. i$y 

any one, that individual life is poverty-stricken and 
can have no sense. 

" This is Buddhism, Nirvana," they say, and it 
seems to them that with these words they have 
overthrown all that has been and is confessed by 
millions of people, and what each of us, in the 
depths of his soul, knows very well, — namely, that 
life for the aims of the individual is pernicious and 
senseless, and that if there is any escape from this 
perniciousness and senselessness, that escape in- 
dubitably leads through the renunciation of the 
happiness of the individual. 

The fact that the larger half of mankind has 
understood and does understand life thus, the fact 
that the grandest minds have understood life in 
the same manner, the fact that it is impossible to 
understand it otherwise, does not trouble them in 
the least. They are so firmly convinced that all 
the questions of life, if not settled in the most 
satisfactory manner, are set aside by the telephone, 
operettas, bacteriology, electric lighting, and so 
on, that the idea of renouncing their individual 
life appears to them only as an echo from ancient 
ignorance. 

But, in the meanwhile, the unhappy men do not 



J 58 LIFE. 

suspect that the very roughest Hindu, who stands 
for years upon one leg, in the name only of renun- 
ciation of individual happiness for Nirvana, is, 
without any comparison, a more living man than 
they, the men of our contemporary European so- 
ciety, who have turned to beasts, who fly all over 
the world on railways, and exhibit to the whole 
world, by the electric light, their brutish condi- 
tion. 

That Hindu has understood that in the. life 
of individuality and the life of reason there is a 
contradiction, and that he is solving it according 
to his light ; but the men of our cultivated world 
have not only not comprehended this contradic- 
tion, but do not even believe that it exists. The 
proposition that the life of man is not the exist- 
ence of the individuality of man, won by the spirit- 
ual toil of all mankind prolonged through thou- 
sands of years, — this proposition has become for 
the man (not for the animal) not only as indubita- 
ble and unalterable a truth as the revolution of 
the earth or the laws of gravity, but even more 
indubitable and unalterable. Every thinking man, 
learned or ignorant, child or old man, under- 
stands and knows this ; it is concealed only from 



WHAT IS REQUIRED. j^g 

the savage men or Africa and Australia, and from 
easy-going people in our European towns and 
capitals who have become savage. 

This truth has become the property of man- 
kind, and if mankind does not return to its illegiti- 
mate branches of learning, mechanics, algebra, 
astronomy, still less can it retrograde in the fund- 
amental and chief learnin°; of the definition of his 
life. It is impossible to forget and erase from 
the consciousness of man that which he has gath- 
ered from his life of many thousand years — the 
solution of vanity and senselessness, and the 
wretchedness of individual life. The attempts to 
resuscitate the savage, antediluvian view of life as 
an individual existence, with which the so-called 
science of our European world is engaged, only 
exhibit more visibly the growth of rational con- 
sciousness in mankind, and demonstrate clearly 
how mankind has already outgrown its childish 
garments. And the philosophical theories of self- 
annihilation, and the practice of suicide, which is 
growing to fearful proportions, prove the impossi- 
bility of a return of mankind to the degrees of 
consciousness already lived through. 

Life, as an individual existence, has been out- 



160 LIFE - 

lived by mankind, and it is impossible to return to 
it, and to forget that the individual existence of 
man has no sense, is impossible. Whatever we 
may write or say or discover, to whatever point we 
may perfect our personal life, the renunciation of 
possible happ ness for the individual remains an 
incontrovertible truth for every thinking man of 
our times. 

" But, nevertheless, it does revolve." 
The point does not lie in overthrowing the 
proposition of Galileo and Copernicus, and in 
devising new Ptolemaic circles, — they are no 
longer to be devised, — but the point lies in pro- 
ceeding further, in drawing the most extreme 
conclusions from this proposition, which has 
already passed into the general knowledge of 
mankind. The same with the proposition relat- 
ing to the impossibility of personal happiness, 
enounced by the Brahmins, and by Buddha, and 
Lootzi, and Solomon, and the Stoics, and by all 
the true thinkers of mankind. We must not con- 
ceal from ourselves this proposition, and walk 
around it in all directions, but boldly and clearly 
confess it, and draw from it the most extreme 
deductions. 



CHAPTER XXL 

THE FEELING OF LOVE IS A PHENOMENON OF THE 
INDIVIDUAL ACTIVITY BROUGHT INTO SUBJEC- 
TION TO RATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 

It is impossible for a rational being to live for 
the aims of individuality. It is impossible be- 
cause all roads are prohibited to it, all aims to 
which the animal individuality is drawn are plainly 
unattainable. Rational consciousness points out 
other aims, and these aims are not only attainable, 
but give full satisfaction to the rational conscious- 
ness of man ; at first, however, under the influ- 
ence of false teaching of the world, it seems to 
man that these aims are opposed to his individu- 
ality. 

Try as a man may, who has been reared in our 
world with cultivated, exaggerated desires of the 
individual, to acknowledge himself as an " I " in 
his reason, he will not feel in this " I " the aspira- 
tion towards life which he feels in his animal 
person. The " I " of the reason contemplates 
161 



1 62 LIFE. 

life, as it were, but does not itself live, and 
has no aspirations towards life, but the animal 
"I" must suffer and therefore remains alone — 
to free itself from life. 

Thus, in bad faith, do the negative philosophers 
of our times (Schopenhauer, Hartmann) settle the 
question — philosophers who deny life and who 
yet remain in it, instead of availing themselves of 
the possibility of quitting it. And thus, in good 
faith, do suicides decide this question, by quitting 
a life which offers them nothing but evil. 

Suicide presents to them the only escape from 
the incoherence of the human life of our times. 

The argument of pessimistic philosophy and of 
the most commonplace suicides is as follows : 
there is an animal ego in which there is an incli- 
nation for life. This ego and its inclination can- 
not be gratified ; there is another ego, of the 
reason, in which there is no inclination for life, 
which only critically surveys all the false joy of 
life, and the passion of the animal ego, and rejects 
all of it. 

If I yield myself to the former, I see that I 
live senselessly, and that I am on my way to 
misery, plunging ever deeper and deeper in it. If 



THE FEELING OF LOVE. 



163 



I yield myself to the latter, to the rational ego 
there remains within me no inclination for life. I 
see that to live for that for which alone it pleases 
me to live, for my personal happiness, is awk- 
ward and impossible. It would be possible to live 
for rational consciousness, but there is no object 
in it, and I do not wish it. Serve that origin from 
which I proceeded — God. Why ? God — if he 
exists — will find other servitors beside me. But 
why should I ? 

It is possible to look on at all this game of life 
until it becomes tiresome. And when it does be- 
come tiresome, I can leave it — I can kill myself. 
And that is what I do. 

This is the contradictory representation of life 
which mankind had reached before Solomon's day, 
before Buddha's, and to which the false teachers of 
our times wish to lead him back. 

The wants of the individual are pushed to the 
most extreme limits of senselessness. The reason 
on awakening rejects them. But the wants of the 
individual have grown to such proportions, have 
so encumbered man's consciousness, that it seems 
to him that reason rejects the whole of life. It 
seems to him that if he eradicates from his sense 



164 LIFE ' 

of life all that his reason rejects, nothing will re- 
main. He does not yet perceive what will remain. 
The remnant, that remnant in which is life, seems 
nothing to him. 

"But the light shineth in darkness and the 
darkness comprehendeth it not." 

The teaching of the truth recognizes this di- 
lemma — either a senseless existence or a renun- 
ciation of it, — and "it solves it." 

The teaching which has always been called the 
doctrine of happiness — the teaching of the truth — 
has pointed out to people (instead of that decep- 
tive happiness which they seek for their animal 
personality) — not that they may receive some- 
where and at some time, — but that they always 
possess, here, and now, an inalienable and actual 
happiness which is always attainable by them. 

This happiness is not merely something deduced 
from reasoning, it is not that something or other 
which must be sought somewhere, it is not that 
happiness promised somewhere and at some time, 
but is that same happiness which is familiar to 
man, and towards which every unperverted human 
soul is drawn. 

All men know, from the earliest years of their 



THE FEELING OF LOVE. 



I6 5 



childhood, that, in addition to the happiness of the 
animal person, there is still another and better 
happiness of life, which is not only independent 
of the gratification of the animal person, but 
which, on the contrary, becomes all the greater 
in proportion to the renunciation of the happiness 
of the animal person. 

The feeling which solves all the contradictions 
of human life, and gives the greatest possible hap- 
piness to man, these men know. This feeling is 
love. 

Life is the activity of the animal personality, 1 
subjected to the law of reason. Reason is that 
law to which, for its own happiness, the animal 
personality of man must be rendered subservient. 
Love is the only reasonable activity of mankind. 

The animal personality inclines to happiness ; 
reason demonstrates to man the delusiveness of 
personal happiness, and leaves but one path. Ac- 
tivity along this pathway is love. 

The animal personality of man demands happi- 
ness ; rational consciousness shows man the mis- 
ery of all beings who contend with each other, 
demonstrates to him that there can be no happi- 
ness for his animal individual, shows him that the 



1 66 LIFE. 

only happiness possible to him is one in which 
there shall be no contest with other beings, no 
cessation of happiness, no satiety, in which there 
shall be no prevision or fear of death. 

.And lo, like a key made for this one lock alone, 
man finds in his own soul a feeling which gives 
him that very happiness which his reason indicates 
to him as the only possible one. And this feeling 
not only solves the former contradictions of life, 
but finds in these very contradictions, as it were, 
a possibility of manifesting itself. 

Animal individualities desire to employ for their 
ends the individuality of man. But the feeling of 
love inclines him to give his existence for the good 
of other beings. 

The animal individual suffers. And this suffer- 
ing and its alleviation constitute the chief activity 
of love. The animal individual, in striving after 
happiness, strives with every breath towards the 
greatest evil — towards death, the prevision of 
which has destroyed every bliss of the individual. 

But the feeling of love not only annihilates this 
fear, but inclines man to the extremest sacrifice of 
his fleshly existence for the happiness of others. 



1 . CHAPTER XXII. 

THE MANIFESTATION OF THE FEELING OF LOVE IS 
IMPOSSI3LE FOR MEN WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND 
THE MEANING OF THEIR LIFE. 

Every one knows that in the feeling of love 
there is something peculiar, capable of solving all 
the contradictions of life, and of giving man that 
full happiness in the striving for which his life 
consists. 

" But this feeling comes rarely, continues for 
but a brief time, and its consequences are still 
worse than suffering," say men who do not under- 
stand life. 

To these men, love does not present itself as the 
sole legitimate manifestation of life which it repre- 
sents to the rational consciousness, but merely as 
one amonsr thousands of the varied accidents which 
occur in life ; it presents itself as one of those 
thousands of varied moods in which man finds 
himself in the course of his existence : there are 
times when a man parades as a dandy, there are 

167 



I 68 LIFE. 

times when he is attracted by science or art, there 
are times when he is inclined to service, to ambi- 
tion, to acquisition ; there are times when he loves 
some one. The mood of love presents itself to. 
men who do not understand life, not as an essen- 
tial point in human life, but as an accidental frame 
of mind, — and hence as independent of their will, 
like all the others to which man is subject in the 
course of his life. It is often possible even to 
read and to hear arguments to the effect that love 
is something irregular, which disturbs the regular 
current of life, — a torturing state of mind. Some- 
thing like what it must seem to the owl when the 
sun rises. 

It is true that even these people feel that there 
is in the state of love something peculiar and more 
important than in all other frames of mind. But, 
not understanding life, these people cannot under- 
stand love, and the condition of love seems to 
them as lamentable and as deceptive as all other 
conditions. 

"Love? — But whom? It is not worth while 
to love for a time, and to love forever is impos- 
sible." 

These words may express the confused knowl- 



THE MANIFESTATION OF LOVE. iftg 

* 

edge of people that in love there is salvation from 
the misery of life, and the only thing resembling 
true happiness, and, at the same time, a confession 
that, for people who do not understand life, love 
cannot be an anchor of safety. There is no one 
to love, and all love vanishes. And, therefore, 
love can be happiness only when there is some one 
to love, and when it should be some one whom it 
would be possible to love eternally. And, as there 
is nothing of the kind, there is no salvation in 
love, and love is as much of a delusion and suffer- 
ing as everything else. 

And thus, and not in any other way, can people 
understand love, who have learned and who thenv 
selves teach that life is nothing else than an ani- 
mal existence. 

For such people, life does not even correspond 
to that conception which we all involuntarily con- 
nect with the word love. It is not a beneficial 
activity, giving happiness to the one who loves, 
and to the person loved. It very frequently hap- 
pens that love, in the estimation of people who 
recognize life in the animal person, is the same 
feeling in consequence of which one mother, for 
the welfare of her child, will deprive another hun- 



170 - LIFE. 

gry child of its mother's milk, and suffer with 
anxiety for the success of the feeding ; that feel- 
ing which makes the father, to his own torture, 
take the last bit of bread from hungry men in 
order to provide for his children ; it is the feeling 
through which he who loves a woman suffers from 
this love, and causes her to suffer, seducing her, 
or killing both himself and her out of jealousy ; 
that feeling through which it even happens that a 
man violates a woman out of love ; it is that feel- 
ing through which men belonging to one associa- 
tion injure other associations, for the sake of up- 
holding their own fellows ; it is that feeling which 
makes a man torment himself over his favorite 
occupations, and by these same occupations cause 
grief and suffering to the people about him ; it is 
the feeling which renders a man unable to endure 
an insult to his beloved fatherland, strews the 
plain with dead and wounded, his own countrymen 
and others. 

But even this is not all ; the activity of love, for 
people who recognize life as lying in the happiness 
of the animal individual, presents such difficulties 
that its manifestations become not only painful but 
often impossible. " Love must not be discussed," 



THE MANIFESTATION OF LOVE. I ^ I 

« 

is what is generally said by the people who -do not 
understand life ; " but one must yield to that direct 
feeling of preference, of passion, for people, which 
one experiences, — and this is genuine love." 

They are right in saying that love must not be 
argued about, that every argument about love 
destroys love. But the point lies in this, that 
only those people can refrain from discussing love 
who have already applied their reason to the un- 
derstanding of life, and who have renounced the 
happiness of individual life ; but those people who 
have not attained to a comprehension of life, and 
who exist for the animal person, cannot do other- 
wise than discuss it. It is indispensable that they 
should discuss it, in order to be able to give them- 
selves over to that feeling which they call love. 
Every manifestation of this feeling is impossible 
to them without discussion, without solving in- 
soluble problems. 

In point of fact, men prefer their own child, 
their own friends, their own wife, their own chil- 
dren, their own country, to all other children, 
wives, friends, countries, and call this feeling love. 

To love generally means to do good. Thus we 
have all understood love, and we cannot under- 



1 72 LIFE. 

stand it otherwise. And behold, I love my child, 
my wife, my country, i. e., I desire the welfare of 
my child, my wife, my country, rather than the 
welfare of children, wives, and countries. It never 
■ m happens, and it never can happen, that I should 
love only my child, or wife, or my own country 
only. Every man loves his child, and wife, and 
children, and country, and men in general, to- 
gether. Meanwhile, those conditions of happiness 
which, because of his love, he desires for the dif- 
ferent objects of his love, are so connected to- 
gether that every loving activity of man, for one of 
his beloved beings alone, not only interferes with 
his activity for others, but accrues to the detri- 
ment of others. 

And here the questions present themselves — 
in the name of what love, and how to act ? In 
the name of what love to sacrifice another love, 
whom to love most, and to whom to do the most 
good, — to one's own wife and children, or to the 
wives and children of others ? How to serve one's 
beloved country without infringing upon one's 
love for one's wife and children and friends ? 

How, in short, to decide the question as to how 
much I can sacrifice my own personality which is 



THE MANIFESTATION OF LOVE. jy^ 

necessary for the service of others ? How much 
care may I take of myself, in order to be able, 
since I love others, to serve them ? All these 
questions seem very simple to people who do not 
know how to account to themselves for that 
feeling which they call love ; but they are not 
only not simple — but they are absolutely unan- 
swerable. 

And not without a reason did the publican put 
to Christ the question : " Who is my neighbor ? " 
The answer to these questions seems very easy 
only to those people who have forgotten the pres- 
ent conditions of human life. 

Only in case men were gods, as we imagine 
them to be, could they love merely chosen people ; 
then only could the preference of some over 
others be true love. Men are not gods, but 
find themselves subject to conditions of existence 
under which all living beings always live upon 
each other, devouring each other, both in a direct 
and in a figurative sense ; and man, as a reason- 
able being, must know and see this. He must 
know that every happiness of the flesh is received 
by one being only at the expense of another. 

However much religious and scientific supersti- 



174 LIFE - 

tions may assure men of some future golden age, 
in which everybody will have enough of every- 
thing, the rational man sees and knows that the 
law of his temporal existence in space is the 
struggle of all against each, of each against each 
and against all. 

. In the pressure and conflict of animal interests 
which constitute life, it is impossible for men to 
love selected individuals, as those people who do 
not understand life imagine. Man, if he loves 
even selected individuuls, can never love more 
than one. Every man loves his mother, and his 
wife, and his child, and his friends, and his coun- 
try, and even all men. And love is not a word 
only (as all are agreed that it is), but activity 
directed to the good of others. But this activity 
does not proceed in any definite order, so that at 
first the demands of a man's own strong, personal 
love are the first to present themselves, next the 
less powerful, and so on. The demands of love 
present themselves constantly, all at once, with- 
out any order. Just now a hungry old man, of 
whom I am rather fond, comes to me and asks 
for the food which I am keeping for the supper of 
my dearly loved children. How can I weigh the 



THE MANIFESTATION OF LOVE. jy$ 

demands of a temporary and less powerful love 
with the future demands of a stronger love ? 

These same questions were put by the lawyer 
to Christ : " Who is my neighbor ? " In fact, 
how are we to decide whom it is necessary to serve, 
and in what degree : people or our father-land ? 
father-land or our friends ? our friends or our own 
wife ? our wife or our father ? our father or 
our children ? our children or ourselves ? (In 
order to be in a condition to serve others when 
this is necessary.) 

Surely, all these are the demands of love, and 
all are so interwoven with each other that the 
satisfaction of the demands of some deprive man 
of the possibility of satisfying the demands of the 
others. If I admit that it is possible not to clothe 
a shivering child because my children will be in 
want, some day, of the garment which is asked of 
me, then I need not yield to other demands of 
love in the name of my future children. 

It is precisely the same in relation to love for 
one's country, for chosen occupations, and for all 
men. If a man can deny the demands of the 
very smallest present love, in the name of the 
very greatest love in the future, is it not clear 



176 



LIFE. 



that such a man, even if he desired this with all 
his heart, will never be in a condition to weigh in 
what measure he can refuse the demands of the 
present in the name of the future, and therefore, 
not being competent to decide this question, he 
will always choose that manifestation of love 
which is agreeable to him, i. e., he will act, not in 
the name of his love, but in the name of his indi- 
viduality. If a man decides that it is better for 
him to refrain from the demands of the smallest 
present love in the name of a future and different 
manifestation of a greater love, then he deceives 
either himself or others, and loves no one but 
himself alone. 

There is no love in the future. Love is only 
activity in the present. And the man who mani- 
fests no love in the present has no love. 

The same thing also comes to pass in the con- 
ception of life, in those people who have no life. 
If men were animals without reason, they would 
exist like animals, and would not discuss life ; and 
their animal existence would be legitimate and 
happy. It is the same with love.; if men were 
animals without reason, they would love those 
whom they do love, their young wolves, their 



THE MANIFESTATION OF LOVE, iyy 

flock ; and they would not know that they love 
their young wolves or their flock, and they would 
not know that other wolves love their litter of 
cubs, and other flocks their comrades in the flock, 
and their love would be that love and that life 
which are possible on that plane of consciousness 
upon which they find themselves. 

Men are reasoning beings, and they cannot 
help perceiving that others cherish the same love 
for their own, and that therefore these feelings 
of love must come in conflict and produce some- 
thing not favorable, but quite opposed to the con- 
ception of love. 

But if men employ their reason in justifying 
and strengthening that animal and ill disposed 
sentiment which they call love, communicating 
to that sentiment monstrous proportions, then 
that sentiment becomes not only the reverse of 
good, but it makes of man — a truth long since 
established — the most malign and terrible of 
animals. That takes place which is described in 
the Gospels : " If the light that is in thee be 
darkness, how great is that darkness ! " If there 
were nothing in man except love for himself and 
his children, there would not be even ninety-nine 



i 7 8 



LIFE. 



hundredths of the evil that now exists among 
men. Ninety-nine hundredths of the evil among 
men spring from that false feeling which they, laud- 
ing it, call love, and which is as much like love 
as the life of the animal is like the life of man. 

What people who do not understand life call 
love, is only the familiar preference of some con- 
ditions of their personal happiness to others. 
When a man who does not understand life says 
that he loves his wife or his child or his friend, 
he merely says that the presence in his life of his 
wife or his child or his friend heightens the happi- 
ness of his individual life. 

These preferences bear the same relation to 
love that existence bears to life. And as exist- 
ence is called life by the people who do not know 
what life is, so the preference of some conditions 
of personal existence to others is called love by 
the same people. 

These feelings — preferences for certain beings, 
as, for example, for one's children, or even for 
certain occupations, for science, for instance, or 
for art, we also call love ; but such feelings of 
preference, infinitely varied, constitute the whole 
complication of the visible, tangible animal life of 



THE MANIFESTATION OF LOVE. 



79 



men, and cannot be called love, because they have 
not the chief mark of love — activity which has for 
its aim and end happiness. 

The violence of manifestation of these prefer- 
ences only demonstrates the energy of the animal 
personality. The violence of preference of some 
people over others, inaccurately called love, 
is merely the stock upon which true love, and 
even its fruits, pay be grafted. But, as the 
stock is not the apple-tree and does not yield 
fruit, or gives only bitter fruit, instead of sweet, 
so passion is not love, and does no good to 
people, or produces still greater evil. And there- 
fore the much vaunted love for wife and chil- 
dren, as well as for friends, brings the greatest 
evil to the world, not to mention love for science, 
for art, for one's country, which is nothing else 
than a preference, for the time being, of certain 
conditions of the animal life of others. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

TRUE LOVE IS THE RESULT OF THE RENUNCIA- 
TION OF PERSONAL HAPPINESS. 

True love, then, becomes possible, only on the 
renunciation of happiness for the animal person- 
ality. 

The possibility of true love begins only when 
a man has comprehended that there is no happi- 
ness for his animal person. Only then will all 
the sap of his life pass into the one ennobling 
shoot of genuine love, which has already grown 
stout with all the powers of the trunk of the wild 
sapling of the animal person. And the teaching 
of Christ is the graft for this love. And he him- 
self said this. He said that he, his love, was the 
one branch which could bring forth fruit, and 
that every branch which bringeth not forth fruit 
is cut off. 

Only he who has not only understood, but has 
by his life confessed that he that loves his soul 
loses it, and that he who hates his soul in this 

180 



TRUE LOVE. !8l 

* 

world preserves it to everlasting life — only he 
understands genuine love. 

" And he who loveth father or mother more 
than me is unworthy of me. And he that loveth 
son or daughter more than me is unworthy of me. 
If ye love them that love you, that is not love ; 
but love your enemies, love them that hate you." 

It is not by love for father, or son, or wife, or 
friends, or good and amiable people, as it is gener- 
ally thought, that men renounce their individual- 
ity, but only as a result of the recognition of the 
vain existence of the individual, a recognition of 
the impossibility of its happiness, and therefore 
as a result of the renunciation of individual life, 
that man becomes acquainted with real love, and 
can really love father, son, wife, children, and 
friends. 

Love is the preference of other beings to one's 
self, to one's animal personality. 

The neglect of the nearest interests of the in- 
dividual, for the attainment of distant aims of the 
same individual, as is the case with what is gener- 
ally called love, which has not grown to self-sacri- 
fice, is merely the preference of some beings over 
others, for one's own individual happiness. True 



1 82 LIFE. 

love, before it becomes an • active sentiment, must 
be a certain condition. The beginning of love, 
its root, is not a burst of feeling, clouding the 
reason, as is generally imagined, but is the most 
rational, luminous, and therefore tranquil and joy- 
ous state, peculiar to children and to reasonable 
people. 

This state is a state of affection towards all 
people, which is inherent in children, but which 
in grown persons arises only on renunciation, and 
increases only with the degree of renunciation of 
individual happiness. How often are we forced to 
hear the words : " It is all the same to me, I need 
nothing," and in connection with these words to 
see an unloving mien towards men. But let every 
man try, at least once, at a moment when he is 
ill disposed towards people, to say to himself hon- 
estly and from his soul, " It is all the same to me, 
I need nothing," and, only for a time, to desire 
nothing for himself, and every man will learn, 
through this simple, inward experiment, how in- 
stantaneously, in proportion to the honesty of his 
renunciation, all malevolence will disappear, and 
how, afterwards, affection towards all people will 
gush from his heart, sealed up to that time. 



TRUE LOVE. iS$ 

Love is, in truth, a preference of other beings 
to one's self, — surely that is the way we all under- 
stand love, and it is impossible to understand it 
otherwise. The amount of love is the amount of 
the fraction whose numerator is my partiality, my 
sympathy for others, — is not in my power ; but 
the denominator, my love for myself, can be aug- 
mented or diminished by me, to infinity, in pro- 
portion to the significance which I attribute to 
my animal personality. But the judgment of our 
world, concerning love, concerning its grades, is a 
judgment as to the size of the fraction according 
to the numerator alone, without regard to the 
denominator. 

Real love always has as its foundation renun- 
ciation of individual happiness, and the affection 
towards all men which arises therefrom. Only 
upon this universal affection can spring up genu- 
ine love for certain people, — one's own relatives 
or strangers. And such love alone gives the true 
bliss of life, and solves the apparent contradic- 
tions of the animal and the rational conscious- 
ness. 

Love which has not for its foundation renuncia- 
tion of individuality, and, as a consequence, affec- 



1 84 LIFE - 

tion for all people, is merely the life of the animal, 
and is subject to the same and to even greater 
miseries, and to still greater folly, than life with- 
out this fictitious love. The feeling of passion 
called love not only does not remove the conflict 
of existences, does not free an individual from the 
pursuit of enjoyments, and does not save from 
death, but merely darkens life still more, embit- 
ters the strife, augments the thirst for pleasures 
for one's self and others, and increases the terror 
of death for one's self and others. 

The man who places his life in the existence of 
the animal individual cannot love, because love 
must seem to him an activity directly opposed to 
his life. The life of such a man is only in the hap- 
piness of his animal existence ; but love demands, 
first of all, the sacrifice of that happiness. Even 
if a man, who does not understand life, should 
sincerely wish to give himself up to the activity 
of love, he will not be in a condition to do this, 
until he understands life, and changes his whole 
relation to it. The man who seeks his life in the 
happiness of his animal person, who increases, dur- 
ing the whole course of his life, the means of his 
animal happiness, by acquiring wealth and hoard- 



TRUE LOVE. 185 

ing it, will make others serve his animal happi- 
ness, and will distribute that happiness among 
those individuals who have been most useful to 
him for the happiness of his person. But how is 
he to give up his life, when his life is supported 
not by himself, but by other people ? And still 
more difficult will it be for him to choose to which 
of the persons whom he prefers he shall give the 
happiness which he has accumulated. 

In order to be in a position to give up his life, 
he must first give away that superfluity which he 
takes from others for the happiness of his own 
life ; and more than that, he must accomplish the 
impossible : decide which of the people he is to 
serve with his life. 

Before he will be in a condition to love, that is 
to do good, sacrificing himself, he must cease to 
hate, that is, to do evil, and he must cease to pre- 
fer some people to others for the happiness of his 
person. 

Only for the man who does not acknowledge 
happiness in individual life, and who does not, 
therefore, trouble himself about that false happi- 
ness and about that affection, towards all men, 
proper to man which is set free in him, is the 



1 86 LIFE. 

activity of love, which always satisfies him and 
others, possible. 

The happiness of the life of such a man in love 
is like the happiness of the plant in the light; 
and hence, as the covered plant cannot in any 
way inquire, and does not inquire, in what direc- 
tion it is to grow, and whether the light is good, 
whether it must not wait for some other and bet- 
ter light, but takes the only light that exists, and 
stretches towards it, — thus the man who has 
renounced individual happiness does not argue 
about what he must give up of that which he has 
taken from other people, and to what beloved 
beings, and whether there is not some better love 
than the one which makes the demand, — but 
gives himself, his being, to the love which is ac- 
cessible to him, and which lies before him. Only 
such love gives full satisfaction to the reasoning 
nature of man. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

LOVE IS LOVE ONLY WHEN IT IS THE SACRIFICE 

OF SELF. 

And there is no other love than this, that a 
man should lay down his life for his friend. 
Love is love only when it is the sacrifice of one's 
self. Only when a man gives to another, not 
merely his time and his strength, but when he 
spends his body for the beloved object, gives up 
his life for him, — only this do we all acknowledge 
as love ; and only in such love do we all find hap- 
piness, the reward of love. And only in virtue of 
the fact that there is such love towards men, only 
in this, does the world stand. A mother who 
nurses her child gives herself directly, her body, 
for the nourishment of the children, who, were it 
not for this, would not be alive. And this is love. 
Exactly in the same manner does every laborer 
for the good of others give his body for the nour- 
ishment of another, when he exhausts his body 

187 



1 88 LIFE. 

with toil, and brings himself nearer to death. 
And such love is possible only for the man be- 
tween whom and the possibility of sacrifice of 
himself and other beings whom he loves there 
stands no limit to sacrifice. The mother who 
gives her child to a nurse cannot love it ; a man 
who acquires and hoards his money cannot love. 

" If any man say that he is in the light, and 
hateth his brother, he is still in darkness. If 
any man love his brother, that man abideth in 
the light and there is no deceit in him. But he 
that hateth his brother dwelleth in darkness, and 
walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he 
goeth, because darkness hath blinded his eyes. 
. . . Let us love not in word or with the tongue, 
but in deed and truth. And hereby do we know 
that we are of the truth, and our hearts are set 
at rest. . . . Love attaineth such perfection in us 
that we have boldness in the day of judgment, be- 
cause we so walk in the world even as He walked. 
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth 
out fear, for in fear there is torment. He that 
feareth is not made perfect in love." 

Only such love gives true life to men. 

" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all 



LOVE, THE SACRIFICE OF SELF. jgg 

4 

thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind. 
This is the first and great commandment." And 
the second is like unto it : " Thou^ shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself," said the lawyer to Christ. 
And to this Jesus replied : " Thou hast said 
rightly, so do," — i. e., love God and thy neigh- 
bor — and th'ou shalt live. 

True love is life itself. " We know that we 
have passed from death to life, because we love 
the brethren," says a disciple of Christ. " He 
that loveth not his brother abideth in death." 
Only he is alive who loves. 

Love, according to the doctrine of Christ, is 
life itself, but not a senseless, suffering, and 
perishing life, but a blessed and endless life. 
And we all know this. Love is not a deduction 
of the mind, it is not the result of certain activity, 
but it is the most joyful activity of the life which 
encompasses us on all sides, and which we all 
know in ourselves from the first memories of 
our childhood to the time when the false teach- 
ing of the world veils it in our soul and deprives 
us of the possibility of testing it. 

But this is not a partiality for that which en- 
hances the temporal happiness of man's person- 



190 LIFE - 

ality, like love towards selected individuals or 
objects, but that striving towards the good of 
that which is within man, which will remain 
in man after the renunciation of the happiness 
of the animal individuality. 

Who among living people does not know that 
blissful sensation, — even if but once experienced, 
and most frequently of all in the earliest child- 
hood, before the soul is yet choked up with all 
that lie which stifles the life in us, — that blessed 
feeling of emotion, during which one desires to 
love everybody, both those near to him, his 
father, and mother, and brothers, and wicked 
people, and his enemies, and his dog, and his 
horse, and a blade of grass ; he desires one thing 
— that it should be well with everybody, that all 
should be happy, and still more he desires that 
he himself may act so that it may be well with 
all, that he may give himself and his whole life 
to making others comfortable and happy. And 
this, and this alone, is that love in which lies 
the life of man. 

This love, in which alone is life, manifests it- 
self in the soul of man as a hardly perceptible, 
tender shoot, in the midst of the coarse shoots 



LOVE, THE SACRIFICE OF SELF. 1 g I 

* 
of weeds resembling- it, of the various carnal de- 
sires of man, which we call love. At first, it 
seems to men, and to the man himself, that 
this shoot is the one from which must grow 
that tree in which the birds shall shelter them- 
selves, — and that all the other shoots are the 
same. 

Men even prefer, at first, the weeds which 
grow faster, and the only shoot of life is stifled 
and languishes ;. but* what is even worse is that 
which most frequently happens : men have heard 
that among the number of these shoots there is 
one which is genuine, life-giving, called love, and, 
trampling it down, they begin to rear another 
shoot from the weeds, calling it love. 

But, what is still worse, men seize the shoot 
with rough hands and cry : " Here it is, we have 
found it, now we know it, let us train it up, love, 
love ! the most elevated sentiment, here it is ! " 
and men begin to transplant it, to correct it, and 
they grasp it, and tread it under foot, until the 
shoot dies before it has flowered, and tj|ese same 
men or others say : " All this is nonsense, folly, 
sentimentality." 

The shoot of love, when it appears, is tender, it 



192 LIFE ' 

does not bear handling, it is powerful only when 
it has attained its growth, — all that men do to it 
is but the worse for it. It needs but one thing — 
that men should not hide from it the sun of rea- 
son, which alone will promote its growth. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

men's efforts, directed to the impossible 
amelioration of their " existence, deprive 
them of the possibility of the one true 

LIFE. 

Only the knowledge of the visionary and delu- 
sive character of the animal existence, and the 
setting free within him of the one true life of 
love, confers happiness upon man. And what 
steps do men take for the attainment of this 
happiness ? Men, whose existence consists in 
the gradual annihilation of personality and in 
the approach of that personality to inevitable 
death, and who cannot fail to be aware of this, 
strive in every way, during the whole period of 
their existence, — to establish that perishing ex- 
istence, to gratify its desires, and thereby to 
deprive themselves of the possibility of the only 
happiness in life — love. 

The activity of men who do not understand life 
is directed, during the entire period of its exist- 
ence, to a conflict for their own existence, to the 
i93 



194 LIFE. 

acquisition of enjoyments, to emancipating them- 
selves from suffering, and to putting away from 
them inevitable death. 

But the increase of enjoyment increases the 
strain of the conflict, the sensitiveness to suffer- 
ing, and brings death nearer. In order to hide 
from himself the approach of death, there is but 
one means : still further to augment pleasure. 
But the augmentation of pleasures reaches its 
limits, pleasure cannot be further increased, it 
passes into suffering and remains only in the form 
of sensitiveness to suffering and terror before 
death, which is approaching ever nearer and 
nearer in the midst of suffering alone. And a 
false circle makes its appearance : one is the 
cause of the other and one augments the other. 
The chief fear in the life of people who do not 
understand life lies in the fact that what they 
regard as pleasures (all pleasures of a rich life), 
being of such a nature that they cannot be shared 
equally among all men, must be taken from others, 
must be obtained by force, by evil, by annihila- 
ting the possibility of that kindly inclination to- 
wards people from which springs love. So that 
pleasure is always directly opposed to love, and 



MEN'S EFFORTS, AND THE TRUE LIFE. jqjj 

the stronger it is, the more opposed is it. So 
that, the stronger, the more intense the activity 
for the attainment of pleasure, the more impos- 
sible becomes the only happiness accessible to 
man — love. 

Life is understood not as it is recognized by 
the rational consciousness — as an invisible but 
undoubted submission at every moment of one's 
animal nature to the law of reason, setting free 
the affection towards all people which is proper 
to man, and the activity of love which flows from 
it, but only as an existence in the flesh during 
a certain period of time under settled conditions 
arranged by us, which exclude the possibility of 
kindliness to all men. 

To people of the doctrine of the world, who 
bend their minds to the organization of fixed 
conditions of existence, it seems that the aug- 
mentation of the happiness of life proceeds from 
the best external arrangement of one's existence. 
But the best external arrangement depends upon 
the exercise of greater violence over men, which 
is directly opposed to love. So that, the better 
their organization, the less possibility of love, the 
less possibility of life, is there left to them. 



I 9 6 LIFE. 

Having applied their reason not to understand- 
ing that the happiness of the animal existence is 
equal to a cipher, men have recognized this cipher 
as a quantity which can be augmented or dimin- 
ished, and in this supposititious augmentation and 
diminution of the cipher they use all the reason 
which remains unapplied in them. 

Men do not perceive that nothing, however 
much it may be multiplied, remains the same to 
every other person, a zero; they do not perceive 
that the existence of the animal personality of 
every man is equally wretched, and cannot be 
rendered happy by any external conditions. Men 
do not wish to see that no one existence, in the 
flesh, can be happier than any other, that this is 
as much a law as that whereby the water on the 
surface of a lake can nowhere rise higher than the 
general level. Men who have perverted their 
understanding do not see this, and apply them- 
selves to this impossible work, and in this eleva- 
tion of the water in various places above the level 
of the lake — after the manner of what is done by 
children bathing, who call it "brewing beer" — 
passes the whole of their existence. 

It seems to them that the lives of men are more 



MEN'S EFFORTS, AiVD THE TRUE LIFE. jgy 

or less happy arfd good ; the existence of a poor 
laborer or of a sickly man, they say, is evil, un- 
happy ; the existence of a rich or a healthy man 
is good and happy, and they bend all the strength 
of their minds to escaping an evil, unhappy, poor, 
and sickly existence, and in constructing for them- 
selves a good, rich, healthy, and happy one. 

They work out for generations the processes for 
organizing and maintaining these various and hap- 
piest of lives, and hand down the programmes of 
these fancied better lives, as they call their animal 
existence, to their descendants. Men vie with each 
other in endeavoring to maintain as well as possi- 
ble that happy life which they have inherited from 
the organization of their parents, or to organize 
for themselves a new and still happier life. It 
seems to men that, by maintaining the order of 
existence which they have inherited, or by estab- 
lishing a new one which is better, as they imagine, 
they are accomplishing something. 

And thus upholding each other in this delusion, 
men often become so sincerely convinced that this 
senseless beating of the water, the absurdity of 
which is evident to themselves, constitutes life, — 
they become so convinced of this, that they turn 



198 LIFE - 

away with scorn from the summons to true life, 
which they hear incessantly ; both in the teaching 
of the truth, and the examples of life presented by 
people who are alive, and in their own suppressed 
hearts ; in which, even to the end, the voice of rea- 
son and of love is never stifled. 

A wonderful thing takes place. Men, vast num- 
bers of men, who possess the possibility of a life 
of love and reason, find themselves in the position 
of those sheep who are being dragged out of a 
burning house, while they, imagining that people 
want to fling them into the fire, exert all their 
strength to contend with those who are trying to 
save them. 

Through fear of death, men do not wish to 
escape from it ; through fear of suffering, men 
torture themselves, and deprive themselves of the 
only happiness and life that are possible for them. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

THE FEAR OF DEATH IS ONLY A CONFESSION OF 
THE UNSOLVED CONTRADICTION OF LIFE. 

" There is no death," the voice of truth says to 
men. " I am the Resurrection and the Life ; he 
that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet 
shall he live. And every one that liveth and be- 
lieveth in Me shall never die. Believest thou 
this ? " 

" There is no death," say all the great teachers 
of the world ; and the same say millions of men who 
understand life, and bear witness to it with their 
lives. And every living man feels the same thing 
in his soul, at the moment when his consciousness 
clears up. But men who do not understand life 
cannot do otherwise than fear death. They see 
it, and believe in it. 

" How is there no death ? " cry these people in 
wrath and indignation. " This is sophistry ! Death 
is before us ; it has mowed down millions, and it 
will mow us down as well. And you may say as 

199 



200 



LIFE. 



much as you please that it does not exist, it will 
remain all the same. Yonder it is ! " 

And they see that of which they speak, as a 
man mentally afflicted sees the vision which terri- 
fies him. He cannot handle the vision, it has 
never touched him ; of its intentions he knows 
nothing, but he is alarmed, and he suffers from 
this imaginary vision, which is deprived of the 
possibility of life. And it is the same with death. 
Man does not know his death, and never can 
know it; it has never yet touched him, of its 
intentions he knows nothing. Then what is it 
that he fears ? 

" It has never yet seized me, but it will seize 
me, that I surely know — it will seize me and 
annihilate me. And that is terrible," say men 
who do not understand life. 

If men with false ideas of life could reason 
calmly, and think accurately on the basis of that 
conception which they have of life, they would be 
forced to the conclusion that in what is produced 
in my fleshly existence by the change which I see 
proceeding, incessantly, in all beings, and which 
I call death, there is nothing disagreeable or 
terrible. 



THE FEAR OF BE A TH. 



201 



I shall die. W*hat is there terrible about that ? 
How many changes have taken place, and are now 
in progress, in my fleshly existence, and I have 
not feared them ? Why should I fear this change 
which has not yet come, and in which there is not 
only nothing repulsive to my reason and experi- 
ence, but which is so comprehensible, so familiar, 
and so natural for me, that during the whole 
course of my life I have formed fancies, I still 
form them, in which the death both of animals 
and of people has been accepted by me as a 
necessary and often an agreeable condition of 
life. What is there terrible about it ? 

For there are but two strictly logical views of 
life: one false — that by which life is understood 
as those seeming phenomena which take place in 
my body from my birth to my death ; and another, 
the true one — by which life is understood as that 
invisible consciousness of it which I bear within 
myself. One view is false, the other is true ; but 
both are logical, and men may hold either the one 
or the other, but in neither the one nor the other 
is the fear of death possible. 

The first false view, which understands life as 
the visible phenomena in the body from birth to 



202 LIFE. 

death, is as old as the world itself. This is not, 
as many think, a view of life which has been 
worked out by the materialistic science and phi- 
losophy of our day ; the science and philosophy of 
our times have only carried this view to its extreme 
limits, by which it becomes more visible than 
hitherto how little this view corresponds to the 
fundamental demands of human life ; but this is 
the ancient and primitive view of men who stood 
upon the lower steps of culture. It is expressed 
among the Chinese, among the Greeks, and among 
the Hebrews, in the Book of Job, and in the sen- 
tence : " Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou 
return." 

This view, in its present expression, runs as 
follows : Life is a chance play of forces- in matter, 
manifesting itself in space and time. And what 
we call our consciousness is not life, but a certain 
delusion of the feelings, which makes it appear 
that life lies in this consciousness. Consciousness 
is the spark which flashes up from matter under 
certain conditions of the latter. This spark flashes 
up, burns, again grows feeble, and finally goes out. 
This spark, that is to say, consciousness, experi- 
enced by matter in the course of a certain time, 



THE FEAR OF DEA TH. 203 

between two endless spaces of time, is nothing. 
And, in spite of the fact that consciousness sees 
and passes judgment on itself and on all the infinite 
world, and beholds all the play of chance of this 
world, — and chief of all, in the contrary some- 
thing that is not accidental, calls this play 
accident, — this consciousness itself is only the 
product of dead matter, a vision, appearing and 
disappearing without any trace or reason. All is 
the product of matter, infinitely varied ; and what 
is called life is only a certain condition of dead 
matter. 

Such is one view of life. This view is utterly 
false. According to this view, the rational con- 
sciousness of man is merely an accident, accom- 
panying a certain condition of matter; and there- 
fore, what we, in our consciousness, call life, is a 
phantom. The dead only exists. What we call 
life is the play of death. With such a view of 
life, death should not only not be terrible, but life 
ought to be terrible, as something unnatural and 
senseless, as it is among the Buddhists, and the 
new pessimists, Schopenhauer and Hartmann. 

The other view of life is as follows. Life is 
only that which I recognize in myself. But I am 



204 LIFE. 

always conscious of my life, not as I have been or 
as I shall be (when I meditate upon my life), but 
I am conscious of my life thus — that I am — that 
I never begin anywhere, that I shall never end 
anywhere. No comprehension of time and space 
is connected with my consciousness of life. My 
life is manifested in time, in space, but this is 
merely its manifestation. But the life itself of 
which I am conscious makes itself perceptible to 
me outside of time and space ; so that, according 
to this view, it appears, not that the conscious- 
ness of life is a phantom, but all that which is 
dependent upon space and is visionary in time. 

And, therefore, a curtailment of the bodily 
existence, so far as connected with time and 
space, has nothing wretched about it, according 
to this view, and can neither shorten nor destroy 
my true life. And, according to this view, death 
does not exist. 

There could be no fear of death according to 
either view of life, if men held strictly to either 
the one or the other. 

Neither as an animal, nor as a rational being, 
can man fear death ; the animal has no conscious- 
ness of life and does not see death, and the 



THE FEAR OF DEATH. 205 

rational being, having a consciousness of life, 
cannot see in the death of the animal anything 
except a natural and never ending movement of 
matter. But if man fears, what he fears is not 
death, which he does not know, but life, which 
alone he does know, and his animal and rational 
existence. That feeling which is expressed in 
men by the fear of death is only the conscious- 
ness of the inward contradiction of life ; just as 
the fear of ghosts is merely a consciousness of a 
sickly mental condition. 

" I shall cease to be, I shall die, all that in 
which I set my life will die," says one voice to a 
man. 

"I am," says another voice, "and I cannot die, 
and I ought not to die. I ought not to die, and 
I am dying." 

Not in death, but in this contradiction lies the 
cause of that terror which seizes upon a man, at 
the thought of death of the flesh : the fear of 
death lies not in the fact that man dreads the cur- 
tailment of his animal existence, but in the fact 
that it seems to him that that will die which can- 
not and must not die. The thought of future 
death is only a transference to the future of the 



206 LIFE. 

death which takes place in the present. The 
phantom which presents itself of a future death 
of the flesh is not an awakening of the thought 
of death, but, on the contrary, an awakening of 
the thought of the life which a man should have 
and which he has not. 

This feeling is similar to that which a man 
would experience on awaking to life in his grave, 
under ground. " There is life, but I am in death, 
and here it is, death ! " He imagines that what 
is and must be will be annihilated. And the mind 
of man mourns and grows afraid. The best proof 
of the fact that the fear of death is not the fear of 
death, but of false life, is this, that men frequently 
kill themselves from the fear of death. 

Men are not terrified by the thought of the 
death of the flesh because they are afraid that 
their life will end with it, but because the death 
of the flesh plainly demonstrates to them the 
necessity of a true life, which they do not pos- 
sess. And this is why people who do not under- 
stand life are so disinclined to think of death. 
To think of death is exactly the same with them 
as to confess that they are not living as their 
rational consciousness demands. 



THE FEAR OF DEATH. 



207 



People who fear death, fear it because it repre- 
sents emptiness and darkness to them ; but they 
behold emptiness and darkness because they do 
not see life. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE DEATH OF THE FLESH ANNIHILATES THE 
BODY WHICH BELONGS TO SPACE AND THE CON- 
SCIOUSNESS WHICH BELONGS TO TIME, BUT IT 
CANNOT ANNIHILATE THAT WHICH CONSTITUTES 
THE FOUNDATION OF LIFE : THE SPECIAL RELA- 
TION OF EVERY CREATURE TO THE WORLD. 

But if men who do not see life woul'd only 
approach nearer to the phantoms which alarm 
them, and would examine them, they would per- 
ceive that for them also they are only phantoms, 
and not realities. 

The fear of death always proceeds, in these peo- 
ple, from the fear of losing, at their death in the 
flesh, their special ego, which, they feel, consti- 
tutes their life. I shall die, my body will moulder 
and destroy my ego. But my ego is that which 
has lived in my body so many years. 

Men prize this ego of theirs; and, assuming that 
this ego corresponds with their fleshly life, they 
draw the deduction that it must be annihilated 
with the destruction of their fleshly life. 
208 



THE DEATH OF THE FLESH. 209 

This is a very common deduction, and it rarely 
enters any one's head to doubt it, and, neverthe- 
less, this deduction is entirely arbitrary. Men — 
both those who consider themselves materialists, 
and those who regard themselves as spiritualists 
— have become so habituated to the notion that 
their ego is the consciousness of their body, which 
has lived so many years, that it never enters their 
heads to verify the authenticity of such a conviction. 

I have lived fifty-nine years, and during the 
whole of that time I have been conscious of 
myself in my body, and this consciousness of 
myself has, as it seems to me, been my life. I 
have lived : neither fifty-nine years, nor fifty-nine 
thousand years, nor fifty-nine seconds. Neither 
my body nor the length of its existence in any 
way determines the life of my ego. If I, at every 
moment of my life, ask myself in my own con- 
sciousness, " What am I ? " I reply : " Something 
thinking and feeling," i. e., bearing itself to the 
world in its own entirely peculiar fashion. 

Only this ego do I recognize as my ego, and 
nothing more. As to when and where I was 
born, when and where I began to think and to 
feel as I now think and feel, I know absolutely 



2IO 



LIFE. 



nothing. My consciousness merely says to me : 
" I am, I am with that relation of mine to the 
world in which I find myself at the present mo- 
ment. 

"Of my birth, my childhood, my period of youth, 
of middle age, of times not very far past, I often 
remember nothing at all. But if I do recall any- 
thing, or if I am reminded of something in my 
past, then I remember — and remember it almost 
exactly as those things which are told me about 
others." 

On what foundation, therefore, do I affirm that, 
during the whole course of my existence, I have 
been but one I ? My body, assuredly, never has 
been and is not one : my body has always been, 
and is ceaselessly wasting substance — through 
something immaterial and invisible, which recog- 
nizes this which flows through it as my body. 
My whole body is changed once in every decade ; 
nothing has been left of the old : muscles and 
inward parts, and bones, and brain, — all have 
undergone a change. 

My body is one only because there is something 
immaterial which admits this changing body as 
one, and its own. This immaterial something is 



THE DEATH OF THE FLESH. 2 II 

that which we cafl consciousness : it alone holds 
the whole body together, and recognizes it as one 
and its own. Without this knowledge of myself 
as separate from everything else, I should know 
nothing of my own or of any other life. And 
therefore, on first thinking the matter over, it ap- 
pears that the foundation of all — consciousness — 
must be constant. But this is incorrect ; and con- 
sciousness is not.constant. During our whole life, 
and even now, there is repeated that phenomenon 
of sleep, which seems to us very simple because 
we all sleep every day, but which is decidedly in- 
comprehensible, if we admit what is self-evident, 
that consciousness is often entirely suspended 
during sleep. 

Every twenty-four hours, during the period of 
profound slumber, consciousness is entirely sus- 
pended, and is afterwards resumed. But in the 
meantime, this same consciousness is the only 
basis upon which the whole body is held together, 
and recognized as its own. It would seem as 
though, on the suspension of consciousness, the 
body should fall apart, and lose its independent 
existence ; but this does not happen either in 
natural or artificial sleep. 



212 



LIFE. 



But not only is the consciousness- which binds 
the whole body together periodically interrupted, 
without the body falling apart, — this conscious- 
ness, in addition, changes like the body. As there 
is nothing in common with my body of ten years 
ago and my present body, — as it is not one and 
the same body, so there has not been one con- 
sciousness in me. My consciousness as a child 
three years of age, and my present consciousness 
are as different as is the matter of my body now 
from what it was thirty years ago. Consciousness 
is not a unit, and there is a series of successive 
states of consciousness, which might be subdivided 
to infinity. 

So that even that consciousness which holds the 
whole body together, and recognizes it as its own, 
is not a unit, but something which is suspended 
and which undergoes change. Consciousness, a 
single consciousness of one's self, as we generally 
imagine it, does not exist in man, as there is not 
one body. There is in man neither one and the 
same body nor one of that thing which sets apart 
this body from every other — there is no con- 
sciousness which is constantly the same, through- 
out the whole life of a man, but there is only a 



THE DEATH OF THE FLESH 213 

series of successive states of consciousness, in 
some manner united — and, nevertheless, man feels 
himself to be himself. 

Our body is not one, and that which recognizes 
this changing body to be one and ours is not con- 
tinuous in point of time, but is merely a series of 
changing states of consciousness, and we have 
already lost both our body and our consciousness 
many times ; we lose our body constantly, and we 
lose our consciousness every day, when we fall 
asleep, and every day and hour we feel in ourselves 
the alteration of this consciousness, and we do not 
fear it in the least. 

Hence, if there is any such thing as our ego 
which we are afraid of losing at death, then that 
ego cannot reside in the body which we call ours, 
nor in that consciousness which we call ours for a 
certain time, but in some other, whole series of 
successive states of consciousness united into 
one. 

What is this something which binds in one all 
the states of consciousness which succeed each 
other in point of time ? What is my same radical 
and peculiar ego, which is not composed of the 
substance of my body and of the series of states 



214 LIFE ' 

of consciousness which proceed in it, but that 
fundamental ego upon which as upon a cord are 
strung, one after the other, the various conscious- 
nesses, which follow each other in point of time ? 
The question seems very profound and wise, but 
there is not a child who would not know how to 
answer it, and who would not utter the response 
twenty times a day. 

"But /love this and I don't love that." 
These words are very simple, but in them lies 
the solution of the question as to the peculiar 
/which binds all consciousnesses in one. It is 
that / which loves this thing and does not love 
that. Why one loves this and does not love that, 
no one knows, and, at the same time, it is this 
which constitutes the foundation of life for every 
man, and it is that which binds in one all the con- 
ditions of consciousness, varying in point of time, 
of every individual man. 

The external world acts upon all men alike, but 
the impressions of men, even when under the very 
same conditions, differ infinitely, both in the 
number received and in their capacity for being 
infinitely subdivided, and in their strength. From 
these impressions is formed the series of succes- 



THE DEATH OF THE FLESH. 215 

sive states of consciousness of every man. But 
all these successive consciousnesses are connected 
on'ly because, even in the present, some impres- 
sions act, and others do not act, upon his con- 
sciousness. But certain impressions act or fail to 
act upon a man only because he loves this more 
or less, and does not love that. 

Only in consequence of this greater or lesser 
degree of love is a certain series of some judg- 
ments, and not of others, formed. So that only in 
the property of loving one more or less, and not 
loving the other, lies that peculiar and fundamen- 
tal ego of man, in which all the scattered and frag- 
mentary senses are united. And this property, 
although it is developed in our life, is borne by us, 
all ready prepared, into this life, from some past 
invisible and unknown to us. 

This peculiar property of men, of loving one 
thing in a greater or less degree and not loving 
another, is usually called character. And by this 
word there is often understood the peculiar quali- 
ties of each individual man, which have taken 
form in consequence of certain conditions of place 
and time. But this is an error. 

The fundamental quality of man, of loving one 



216 LIFE. 

thing more or less and not loving another, does 
not proceed from conditions of time and space, 
but, on the contrary, conditions of time and place 
act or do not act upon a man only because man, 
on his entrance into the world, already has a very 
decided property of loving one and not loving 
another. Only from this cause does it happen 
that men, born and reared in identical conditions 
of time and space, often present the sharpest con- 
trast in their internal ego. 

That which unites in one all the different 
senses, which, in their turn, bind our body in 
one, is a very definite thing, although independent 
of conditions of time and place, and is brought 
into the world by us from the realm of the space- 
less and the timeless : it is that something, which 
lies in my well known, exclusive relations to the 
world, and is my genuine and acting ego. I un- 
derstand myself as that fundamental quality, and 
other men, if I know them, I know only as some 
peculiar relations to the world. On entering into 
serious spiritual communion with men, none of us, 
surely, is guided by their external marks, but each 
of us seeks to penetrate into their nature, that is, 
to understand what is their relation to the world, 



THE DEATH OF THE FLESH. 217 

what they love an'fl in what degree, and what they 
do not love. 

Every being is separate ; if I know a horse, a 
dog, or a cow, and have any spiritual relations with 
them, I do not know them by their external marks, 
but by that peculiar relation to the world in which 
each one of them stands, — by the fact that each 
one of them, and in every degree, loves and does 
not love. If I know the special and various races 
of animals, then, strictly speaking, I know them 
not so much by their external marks, as because 
each one of them — the lion, the fish, the spider 
— presents a general peculiar relation to the world. 
All lions, as a rule, love one thing, and all fish 
another, and all spiders a third ; only because they 
love differently are they distinguished in my im- 
agination as different living creatures. 

But what I do not yet distinguish in each of 
these creatures, his special relation to the world, 
does not prove that he has not been, but only that 
the peculiar relation to the world which consti- 
tutes the life of a single, individual spider is 
remote from that relation to the world in which I 
find myself, and that therefore I have not yet 
understood him as Silvio Pellico understood his 
individual spider. 



21 



LIFE. 



The basis of all that I know about myself, and 
about all the world, is that peculiar relation to the 
world in which I find myself, and in consequence 
of which I see other beings, who are in their own 
peculiar relations to the world. But my relation 
to the world has not been settled in this life, and 
did not begin with this body, nor with the series 
of senses which have followed each other in point 
of time. 

And, therefore, my body, bound in one by my 
temporal senses, may be annihilated, and even my 
temporal existence may be annihilated, but that 
which cannot be annihilated is my peculiar rela- 
tion to the world, which constitutes my peculiar 
ego from which has been created for me all that 
is. It cannot be annihilated, because it alone has 
existence. If it did not exist, I should not know 
the series of my consecutive judgments, I should 
not know my body, I should not know my own 
life or any other. And, therefore, the annihila- 
tion of the body and the senses cannot serve as a 
sign of the annihilation of myself and judgment, 
cannot serve as a sign of the destruction of my 
peculiar relations to the world, which neither 
began nor arose in this life. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

THE FEAR OF DEATH PROCEEDS FROM THE FACT 
THAT MEN ACCEPT AS LIFE ONE SMALL AND 
LIMITED PORTION OF IT WITH THEIR OWN 
FALSE IDEA. 

We are afraid of losing, at the death of the 
flesh, our special ego, uniting the body and a series 
of conscious states, which manifest themselves in 
time, into one ; but, nevertheless, this, my pecul- 
iar ego, did not begin with my birth, and, therefore, 
the suspension of a certain temporary conscious- 
ness cannot annihilate that which unites in one all 
states of consciousness in time. 

The death of the flesh actually destroys that 
which holds the body together — the conscious- 
ness of temporary life. But this happens with us 
invariably, and every day when we fall asleep. 
The question lies here — does the death of the 
flesh destroy that which unites all tire consecu- 
tive states of consciousness into one, that is to 
say, my special relation to the world ? In order 
219 



220 



LIFE. 



to verify this, it is necessary first to demonstrate 
that this special relation to the world, which 
unites in one all succeeding states of conscious- 
ness, was born with my birth in the flesh, and 
that it will, therefore, die with it. But this is 
not so. 

Reasoning upon the foundation of my con- 
sciousness, I see that what binds all my states of 
consciousness into one is a certain impressibility 
towards one thing, and a coldness towards an- 
other, in consequence of which one remains, while 
the other disappears in me, the degree of my love 
for good and of my hatred for evil, — that is, my 
peculiar relation to the world, which constitutes 
me, my special me, is not the result of any exter- 
nal cause, but is the fundamental cause of all the 
other phenomena of my life. 

Reasoning upon the foundation of observation, 
it seems to me at first that the causes of my 
special ego are to be found in the peculiarities of 
my parents, and in the conditions which have 
influenced them an^ me ; but, on proceeding 
further in -this path of reasoning, I cannot fail to 
perceive that if my special ego lies in the peculiari- 
ties of my parents, and the conditions which have 



WHENCE THE FEAR OF DEATH PROCEEDS. 2 2I 

k 
affected them, then it lies also in the peculiarities 

of all my ancestors, and in the conditions of their 
existence, so that my special ego has been pro- 
duced outside the limits of all space, and outside 
of all time, that is, that it is the very thing which 
I recognize it to be. 

In this, and only in this foundation, indepen- 
dent of time and space, of my special relation to 
the world, uniting all the states of consciousness 
within my memory, and all those states which 
preceded memory, of my life (as Plato puts it, 
and as we all feel it in our lives), in that founda- 
tion, in my special relation to the world, is there 
that special ego, as to which we fear that it will be 
annihilated at the death of the flesh. 

But it is merely necessary to understand that 
what unites all states of consciousness in one, that 
what is the special ego of a man, is to be found 
independent of time, that it always has been and 
is, and that what can suspend itself is only a series 
of states of consciousness, within a given time, — 
in order to make it clear that the destruction of 
the last state of consciousness in point of time, at 
the death of the flesh, can as little destroy man's 
true ego as his daily slumber. For no man ever 



222 LIFE. 

feared to fall asleep, although in sleep precisely 
the same thing takes place as at death, namely, a 
temporary suspension of consciousness. Man is 
not afraid of going to sleep, although the suspen- 
sion of consciousness is precisely the same as in 
death, — not because he has reasoned it out that 
he has gone to sleep and waked again, and that 
therefore he will wake again (this reasoning is 
inaccurate : he might wake a thousand times and 
not waken on the thousand and first) ; no one ever 
goes through this reasoning, and this reasoning 
could not reassure him ; but man knows that his 
real ego lives independent of time, and that there- 
fore the suspensions of his consciousness which 
manifest themselves in time cannot destroy his 
life. 

If a man were to fall asleep, as in the fairy 
tales, for a thousand years, he would go to sleep 
as tranquilly as for two hours. For conscious- 
ness which is not temporary but of true life, a 
break of a million years and of eight hours are all 
the same, because for such a life, time does not 
exist. 

The body is annihilated, the consciousness of 
the present day is annihilated. 



WHENCE THE FEAR OF DEATH PROCEEDS. 223 
k 

But it is surely time for man to become accus- 
tomed to the changes of his body, and to the 
replacement of temporary states of consciousness 
by others. For these changes began as long ago 
as man can remember himself, and have proceeded 
uninterruptedly. Man does not fear the change 
in his body, and not only is he not terrified, but 
he often desires to hasten these changes, he 
desires to grow up, to become a man, to recover 
health. A person has been a red piece of flesh, 
and all his consciousness has consisted in the 
demands of the stomach ; now he is a bearded, 
sensible man, or a woman loving her grown-up 
children ! . . . 

Surely there is nothing similar either in body 
or mind, and man has not been terrified by these 
changes which have brought him to his present 
condition, but he has only welcomed them. What 
is there terrible about the impending change ? 
That in which all these changes are effected, — a 
special relation to the world, — that in which con- 
sists the consciousness of the true life, did not 
begin with the birth of the body, but independ- 
ently of the body and independently of time. 
Then how can any change connected with time 



224 LIFE - 

and space destroy that which is not connected 
with it ? Man fixes his eyes upon a small, insig- 
nificant bit of his life, does not wish to see all of 
it, and trembles lest this tiny fragment which is 
dear to him should be lost. This recalls the anec- 
dote of the madman who imagined that he was 
made of glass, and who, when he was thrown 
down, said, " Smash!" and immediately died. In 
order that a man may have life, he must take the 
whole of it, and not that small scrap of it, which 
reveals itself in time and space. To him that 
taketh the whole of life there shall be added, but 
from him that taketh a portion of it shall be taken 
away even that which he hath. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

LIFE IS A RELATION TO THE WORLD. THE MOVE- 
MENT OF LIFE IS THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NEW, 
HIGHER RELATION, AND THEREFORE DEATH IS 
THE ENTRANCE UPON A NEW RELATION. 

We cannot understand life otherwise than as a 
certain relation to the world : thus do we under- 
stand life in ourselves, and thus do we understand 
it in other beings. 

But we understand life in ourselves not only as 
a relation to the world once existing, but as the 
establishment of a new relation to the world 
through greater and ever greater subjection of the 
animal personality to the reason, and the appear- 
ance of a greater degree of love. The inevitable 
destruction of the fleshly existence, which we see 
in ourselves, proves to us that the relation in 
which we stand to the world is not permanent, but 
that we are compelled to establish another. The 
establishment of this new relation, i. e., the move- 
ment of life, also destroys the conception of death. 

225 



226 LIFE. 

Death presents itself only to that man who has 
not recognized his life as lying in the establish- 
ment of a rational relation to the world, and its 
manifestation in ever increasing love, and who 
has remained in this relation, i. e., in that degree 
of love to one thing and dislike to another, with 
which he entered upon existence. 

Life is an unceasing movement, but by remain- 
ing in the same relation to the world, by remaining 
in the same degree of love, with which he entered 
life, he feels its cessation and death presents itself 
to him. 

And death is visible and terrible to such a man 
only. The whole existence of such a man is one 
constant death. Death is visible and terrible to 
him not only in the future, but in the present, at 
all manifestations of the diminution of animal life, 
from youth to old age, because the movement of 
existence from childhood to manhood only seems 
like a temporary augmentation of strength, while 
it is, in reality, merely a hardening of the limbs, 
a decrease of flexibility, of vitality, never ceasing 
from birth to death. Such a man beholds death 
constantly before him, and cannot save himself 
from it by any means whatever. The situation of 



LIFE AND DEATH. 2 2J 

such a man becomes worse and worse with every- 
day and hour, and nothing can improve it. His 
special relation to the world, love to one and lack 
of love for another, seems to such a man only one 
of the conditions of his existence ; and the only- 
business of life, the establishment of a new rela- 
tion to the world, the increase of love, appears to 
him as a useless matter. His whole life is passed 
in the impossible effort to escape from the inevita- 
ble diminution of life, the hardening and weaken- 
ing of it from old age and death. 

But it is not thus for the man who understands 
life. Such a man knows that he brought his pe- 
culiar relation to the world into his present life, 
his love for one and his dislike for the other, from 
his hidden former life. He knows that this love 
of his to one and dislike to the other, which has 
been brought into his existence by himself, is the 
very essence of his life ; that this is not an acci- 
dental property of his life, but that this alone pos- 
sesses the movement of life — and he places his 
life in this movement alone, in the augmentation 
of love. 

Looking at his past in this life, he perceives, 
from the series of the conscious states which he 



228 LIFE - 

remembers, that his relation to the world has 
changed, that his submission to the law of reason 
has increased, and that the strength and scope of 
his love have grown constantly — giving him ever 
more and more happiness, independent of and 
sometimes directly contrary to it in proportion to 
the decrease of the personal existence. 

Such a man, having received his life from a past 
that is invisible to him, acknowledging its constant 
and unbroken growth, transfers it to the unseen 
future, not only calmly but also joyfully. 

It is said : sickness, old age, infirmity, relapse 
into childhood are annihilation of the conscious- 
ness and of the life of man. 

For what man ? 

I imagine to myself, according to tradition, John 
the Divine fallen into childishness from old age. 
According to tradition, he merely said: "Breth- 
ren, love one another." The old man of a hun- 
dred years, who can hardly move, mumbles, with 
tearful eyes, ever the same words : " Love one 
another." In such a man the animal existence 
hardly dawns — it is all devoured by new relations 
to the world, by a new existence which has not 
yet established itself in the fleshly man. 



LTFE AND. DEATH. 2 2Q 

For a man who understands life as lying in that 
in which it really does lie, to speak of the decrease 
of his life in sickness and old age, and to grieve 
over this, is the same as though a man, on ap- 
proaching the light, were to bewail the decrease in 
his darkness, in proportion to the nearness of his 
approach to the light. And to believe in the 
destruction of one's life because the body is 
destroyed is the same as believing that the de- 
struction of the shadow of an object, after -that 
object has stepped into the full light, is a sure sign 
of the destruction of the body itself. Such con- 
clusions could be drawn only by a man who has 
gazed so long upon the shadow alone that he has 
finally imagined that it is the object itself. 

But for the man who knows himself not as a re- 
flection in an existence defined by time and space, 
but by his growth in a loving relation towards the 
world, the destruction of the shadow of the condi- 
tions of time and space is merely a sign of a 
greater degree of light. The man who, under- 
standing his life as that certain special relation to 
the world, with which he entered into existence, 
and which has grown in his life by the augmenta- 
tion of love, believes in his annihilation, is the 



230 



LIFE. 



same as a man who, being acquainted with the ex- 
ternal and visible laws of the world, believes that 
his mother found him under a cabbage leaf, and 
that his body will suddenly fly off somewhere, so 
that nothing will remain of it. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

THE LIFE OF DEAD MEN IS NOT ENDED IN THIS 
WORLD. 

But even more plain does the superstition about 
death become, I will not deny, when looked at 
from another side, but according to the very con- 
stitution of life, as we know it. My friend, my 
brother has lived precisely like myself, and he has 
now ceased to live like me. His life has been his 
consciousness, and it has been passed in the con- 
ditions of his bodily existence ; that is to say, 
there is no place or time for the manifestation of 
his consciousness, and he does not exist for me. 
My brother has been, I have had relations with 
him, but now he is not, and I shall never know 
where he is. 

" The bond between him and us is broken. He 
does not exist for us, and, in like manner, we shall 
not exist for those who remain behind. What is 
this if not death ? " So speak the people who do 
not understand life ; these people are in a visible 

231 



232 LIFE. 

suspension of external communication, an indubi- 
table proof of actual death. But on no occasion 
does the visionary character of the conception of 
death more clearly and more visibly disappear than 
on the suspension of the fleshly existence of peo- 
ple who are near to us. My brother is dead ; what 
has happened ? That has happened which is 
accessible to my observations in time and space ; 
the manifestation of his relation to the world has 
disappeared from before my eyes, and nothing has 
been left behind. 

" Nothing has been left behind," — thus would 
speak a chrysalis, a cocoon, which had not yet re- 
leased the butterfly, on seeing that the cocoon 
lying beside it has been left empty. But the 
cocoon might say this if it could think and speak, 
because, on losing its neighbor, it would, in real- 
ity, no longer feel it in any way. It is not thus 
with man. My brother has died ; his cocoon, it is 
true, has been left empty. I do not see him in the 
form in which I have hitherto seen him, but the 
fact that he has disappeared from my vision has 
not destroyed my relations to him. I retain, as 
the expression gees, a remembrance of him. 

A remembrance remains, — not a remembrance 



THE LIFE OF DEAD MEN. 233 

of his hands, his face, his eyes, but a remem- 
brance of his spiritual form. 

What is this remembrance ? such a simple and 
comprehensible word as it seems ! The forms of 
crystals and animals disappear, — no remembrance 
of them remains among crystals and animals. But 
I retain a remembrance of my friend and brother. 
And this remembrance is all the more vivid in 
proportion as the life of my friend and brother was 
in conformity with the law of reason, and in pro- 
portion as it revealed itself in love. 

This recollection is not merely a representation, 
but this recollection is something of the sort which 
acts on me, and acts precisely as the life of my 
brother did at the period of his earthly existence. 
This memory is that same invisible, immaterial 
atmosphere of his which encompassed his life and 
acted upon me and upon others during his earthly 
existence, exactly as it acts upon me after his 
death. This remembrance "demands of me now, 
after his death, the same that it demanded of me 
during his lifetime. 

And this is not all ; this recollection has become 
more obligatory for me since his death than it was 
during his life. That force of life which resided 



234 LIFE. 

in my brother has not only not vanished nor suf- 
ered diminution, but has not even remained the 
same ; it has increased, and acts more powerfully 
upon me than before. 

The force of his life after his death in the flesh 
has the same action as before his death, or an 
even more powerful one, and acts as though still 
truly living. 

On what grounds can I, feeling in myself that 
power of life, precisely like what it was during the 
existence in the flesh of this brother, i. e., as his 
relation to the world, elucidating to me my rela 
tion to the world, assert that my dead brother has 
no longer life ? I can say that he has quitted that 
lower relation to the world in which he stood as 
an animal, and in which I still find myself, — and 
that is all ; I can say that I do not see the new 
centre of relation to the world in which he now 
stands ; but I cannot deny his life, because I am 
conscious of its power upon me. I have gazed 
upon the reflecting surface of the way in which a 
man holds me ; the reflecting surface has grown 
dim, I no longer see how he holds me, but I feel 
in all my being that he still holds me as before, 
and hence that he exists. 



THE LIFE- OF DEAD MEN. 



235 



But this is not all ; this life of my dead brother, 
which is invisible to me, not only acts upon me, 
but enters into me. His special, living ego, his 
relation to the world, becomes my relation to the 
world. In the establishment of his relation to the 
world, he elevates me, as it were, to that step to 
which he has himself risen, and that 'succeeding 
step to which he has already ascended, vanishing 
from my vision, but drawing me with him, be- 
comes clearer to me, to my special, living ego. 
Thus I am conscious for myself of the life of that 
brother who has fallen asleep in the death of the 
flesh, and, therefore, I cannot doubt it. But by 
observing the action in the world of this life which 
has disappeared from my sight, I am still more 
indubitably convinced of the reality of this life 
which has passed beyond the reach of my eyes. 
The man is dead, but his relation to the world 
continues to act upon men, and not as during life, 
but in a vast number of cases more powerfully, and 
this action is heightened in proportion to its wis- 
dom and love, and it grows like every living thing, 
never ceasing, and knowing no suspension. 

Christ died a very long time ago, and his exis- 
tence in the flesh was brief, and we have a clear 



236 LIFE. 

idea of his person in the flesh ; but the power of 
this wise and loving life, his relation to the world, 
and nothing else, acts to the present day upon 
millions, who receive his relation to the world 
into themselves, and live according to it. What 
is it that acts ? What is it that was formerly 
bound up with the existence of Christ in the flesh, 
and which constitutes the continuation and the 
growth of this same life of his ? We say that it 
is not the life of Christ, but its results. And, hav- 
ing uttered these words utterly destitute of mean- 
ing, it seems to us that we have said something 
clearer and more definite than that this power is 
the living Christ himself. 

Surely, this is exactly the way in which ants 
might talk, who are clustered about an acorn 
which has grown up and become an oak ; the 
acorn has sprung up and become an oak, and it 
tears up the soil with its roots, drops branches, 
leaves, and fresh acorns, it screens from the light, 
the rain, changes everything that formerly grew 
around it completely. " This is not the life of the 
acorn," say the ants, " but the results of its life, 
which came to an end when we dragged off the 
acorn and threw it into a hole." 



THE LIFE OF DEAD MEN. 237 

My brother died yesterday, or a thousand years 
ago, and the same force of his life which acted 
during his existence in the flesh continues to act 
still more powerfully on me and on hundreds, thou- 
sands, millions of people, in spite of the fact that 
the centre of the power of his temporary existence 
in the flesh, which was vjsible to me, has disap- 
peared from my sight. 

What does this mean ? 

I have seen the" light of grass burning before 
me. This grass has died away, but the light has 
only increased ; I do not see the cause of this light, 
I do not know what is burning, I cannot conclude 
that the same fire which consumed the grass is 
now consuming the distant forest, or something 
else which I cannot see. 

But the light is such that I not only see it now, 
but it alone guides me and gives me life. I live 
by this light. How can I deny it ? 

I cannot think that the power of this life has 
now another centre, invisible to me. But deny it 
I cannot, because I feel it. I live and move in it. 
What this centre, what this life is in itself, I can- 
not know — I can guess, if I like guessing, and it 
I am not afraid of becoming entangled. But if I 



238 LIFE. 

am in search of a rational comprehension of life, 
I content myself with the clear and indubitable, 
and I do not wish to spoil the clear and indubita- 
ble by combining with it obscure and arbitrary 
surmises. It is enough for me to know that all 
that by which I live has been formed from the 
life of those who have lived before me, and of men 
who have died long since, and that, hence, every 
man who fulfils the law of life, submitting his 
animal personality to reason, and to the manifes- 
tation of the power of love, has lived and does live 
after the disappearance of his corporeal existence 
in other people, — in order that the clumsy and 
alarming superstition of death should never again 
torment me. 

We can also observe this in people who have 
left behind them a force which continues to act, 
because these people, having submitted their per- 
sonality to reason, and yielded up their lives to 
love, could never doubt, and have not doubted, the 
possibility of the annihilation of this life 

In the life of such people we can also find the 
grounds of their faith, in life everlasting, and again, 
having penetrated into our own life, we can find 
these grounds in ourselves. Christ said that he 



THE LIFE OF DEAD MEN. 239 

should live after the disappearance of the sem- 
blance of life. He said this because already, 
during the period of his corporeal existence, he 
had entered upon that true life which cannot be 
brought to an end. Already, during the time of 
his corporeal existence, he lived in the rays of the 
light from that other centre of life, to which he 
was going, and during his lifetime he saw how the 
rays of that light illuminated the people about 
him. The same thing is seen by every man who 
renounces his personality and lives a life of love 
and reason. 

However contracted may have been the sphere 
of man's activity — whether he be Christ or Soc- 
rates, a good, obscure, self-sacrificing old man, a 
youth, a woman — if he lives, renouncing his per- 
sonality, for the happiness of others, he already 
enters here, in this life, upon that new relation to 
the world which is the business of this life for all 
men. 

The man who has placed his life in subjection to 
the law of reason, and the manifestation of love, 
already beholds in this life, on one side, the rays of 
light from that new centre of life towards which 
he is travelling, and, on the other, the action which 



240 LIFE. 

this light, passing through him, produces upon 
those about him. And this gives him an unwav- 
ering faith in the impossibility of the decrease of 
life, in its immortality and in every augmentation 
of life. It is impossible to receive faith from any 
one, it is impossible to convince one's self of immor- 
tality. In order to have faith in immortality it is 
necessary that the latter should exist ; and in order 
that the latter should exist it is necessary to un- 
derstand one's life in that in which it is immortal. 
Only he can believe in a future life who has per- 
formed his work of -life, who has established in 
that life that new relation to the world which does 
not, as yet, find a place in the world. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

THE SUPERSTITION OF DEATH ARISES FROM THIS, 
THAT MAN CONFOUNDS HIS DIFFERENT RELA- 
TIONS TO THE WORLD. 

Yes, if we look upon life in its true signifi- 
cance, it becomes difficult even to understand by 
what the terrible superstition, of death is sup- 
ported. 

Thus, if you examine that which has frightened 
you in the dark as a phantom, you can never again, 
by any means, revive that visionary fear. 

The fear of losing that which alone is, arises 
only from the fact that life appears to man not 
only in a relation of his mental consciousness to 
the world, which is known but invisible to him, but 
also in two relations which are unknown though 
visible to him : those of his animal consciousness 
and his body to the world. Ail that exists pre- 
sents itself to man : (i) as a relation of his ra- 
tional sense to the world ; (2) as a relation of his 
animal consciousness to the world, and (3) as a 
241 



242 LIFE. 

relation of the matter of his body to the world. 
Not understanding that the relation of his ra- 
tional consciousness to the world is his sole life, 
man imagines his life as still lying in the relation 
of his animal consciousness to the world, and he 
is afraid of losing his special relation to the world, 
when the former relations of his animal person 
and of the matter which constitutes him shall have 
been destroyed. 

To such a man it appears that he proceeds from 
the movement of matter passing to the stage of a 
personal animal consciousness. It seems to him 
that this animal consciousness passes into rational 
consciousness, and that afterwards this rational 
consciousness grows weak, passes back again into 
the animal, and that the animal finally weakens 
and passes into the dead matter from which it was 
derived. 

But the relation of his rational consciousness 
to the world seems to him from this point of 
view something accidental, unnecessary, perish- 
ing. From this point of view, it seems, to him 
that the relation of his animal consciousness to 
the world cannot perish — that his animal will 
be continued in his species ; that the relation of 



ORIGIN OF THE SUPERSTITION OF DEA TH. 243 

matter to the world can be annihilated in any way, 
and eternally ; but that the most precious thing — 
his rational consciousness — is not only not eternal, 
but is only a reflection of something unnecessary 
and superfluous. 

And man feels that this cannot be. And therein 
lies the fear of death. In order to save themselves 
from this fear, some men try to assure themselves 
that their animal consciousness is their rational 
consciousness, and that the immortality of the 
animal man, that is to say, of his race, satisfies the 
demand for the immortality of the rational con- 
sciousness, which they bear within them. Others 
try to convince themselves that a life which has 
never previously existed, which suddenly reveals 
itself in corporeal form, and vanishes in it, will 
rise again in the flesh and live. But belief in 
either is impossible for men who do not recognize 
life as residing in the relation of the rational sense 
to the world. If it is evident to them that the 
continuation of the human race does not satisfy 
the ever recurring demand for the immortality of 
one's individual ego ; and the idea of life begin- 
ning again includes in itself an idea of a suspen- 
sion of life, and if life never existed formerly, 



244 



LIFE. 



has not always existed, then it cannot exist 
afterwards. 

For both classes of men, the earthly life is a 
wave. From dead matter a person is developed, 
from the person a rational consciousness, the crest 
of the wave ; having risen to their height, the 
waves, rational consciousness and individuality, 
fall back in the same place from which they 
started, and are annihilated. Human life is the 
visible life, for both classes. Man has grown up 
and become mature, and died, and after death 
there can be nothing for him, — that which comes 
after him and proceeds from him remains ; either 
posterity or deeds cannot satisfy him. He pities 
himself he fears the cessation of his life. That 
this life of his, which has begun here on earth, 
in his body, and which has here come to an end, 
that this life will revive again of itself, he cannot 
believe. 

Man knows that if he has not existed before, 
and if he has made his appearance from nothing, 
and has died, that he, his special person, will 
never exist longer, and that it cannot be. Man 
recognizes the fact that he will only die when he 
has recognized the fact that he has never been 



ORIGIN OF THE SUPERSTITION OF DEA Til. 245 

born, that he always has existed, does exist, and 
will always exist. Man will only believe in his 
immortality when he comprehends that his life is 
not a wave, but is that eternal movement which 
reveals itself in this life only as a wave. 

It seems that I shall die, and my life will come 
to an end, and this thought tortures and frightens 
me because I am sorry for myself. And what 
will die ? For what do I feel compassion ? What 
am I from the ordinary point of view? First of 
all, I am flesh. What then ? Am I afraid for 
that, am I sorry for that ? It seems not : my 
body, matter, can never be lost, anywhere nor any 
part of it. Hence, this part of me is secure, 
there is nothing to fear for this part. All will be 
preserved in its entirety. 

But no, people say, that is not what I pity. I 
pity Lyef Nikolaevitch, Ivan Semyon. . . . But 
no one is any longer what he was twenty years 
ago, and every day he is a different person. How 
then do I pity myself ? No, they say, that is not 
it, I do not pity that. I pity my consciousness, 
my ego. 

But this consciousness of yours has not always 
been one, but several ; it was one thing a year 



2 4 6 LIFE. 

ago, it was something still more different ten 
years ago, and utterly different still earlier. Does 
your present consciousness please you so greatly, 
that you are so sorry to lose it ? 

If it had always been the same in you, then it 
might be understood, but it has done nothing but 
change. You do not see and cannot find its be- 
ginning, and, all of a sudden, you desire that there 
shall be no end to it, that this consciousness now 
existing in you shall exist forever. You have 
been moving on ever since you can remember. 
You came into this life you yourself know not 
how, but you know that you came as that special 
ego which you are, and then moved on and on 
until you have reached the half-way point, and, all 
of a sudden, you do not exactly rejoice or fear, but 
you have begun to resist, and you do not wish to 
stir from the spot, because you do not see what 
there is ahead. But neither did you see the place 
from which you came, but you came, nevertheless ; 
you have entered at the entrance gate, and you do 
not wish to go out through the gate of exit. 

Your whole life has been a progress through 
corporeal existence ; you have advanced, you have 
hastened your pace, and all at once you have been 



ORIGIN OF THE SUPERSTITION OF DEA TH. 247 

•t 
seized with pity because that very thing is being 

accomplished which you have yourself done in- 
cessantly. The great change in your position at 
the death of your body is terrible to you, but 
the same great change took place with you at your 
birth, and not only did nothing bad come of it for 
you, but, on the contrary, so good a thing came of 
it that you do not wish to part with it. 

What can frighten you ?• You say that you are 
sorry for yourself with your present feelings and 
thoughts, with such views of life, with your pres- 
ent relations to the world. 

You are afraid of losing your present relation 
to the world. What relation is it ? In what does 
it consist ? 

If it consists in your thus eating, drinking, 
reproducing your race, building a dwelling, dress- 
ing yourself, bearing yourself this way or that 
to other people and animals, then this is the rela- 
tion of every man, as a reasoning animal, to life, 
and this relation cannot disappear ; such have 
been, and are, and will be millions, and their pos- 
terity will be preserved as indubitably as every 
fragment of matter. The instinct for the preser- 
vation of their race is inherent in all animals with 



24 8 LIFE. 

such force, that there is no occasion to fear for it. 
If you are an animal, there is nothing for you to 
fear ; and if you are matter, there is still less anx- 
iety as to your immortality. 

But if you are afraid of losing that which is not 
animal, you fear to lose your special rational rela- 
tion to the world — that with which you entered 
upon this existence : but you know that this 
did not have its source at your birth : it exists in- 
dependently of the animal, which is born, and 
therefore cannot be dependent upon its death. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

THE VISIBLE LIFE IS A PART OF THE ENDLESS 
MOVEMENT OF LIFE. 

My earthly life and the lives of all other men 
present themselves to me thus : — 

I and every living man find ourselves in this 
world with a certain, well defined relation to the 
world, with a certain degree of love. It seems to 
us at first that our life begins with this relation 
of ours to the world, but observation of ourselves 
and others shows us that this relation to the world, 
and the degree of love of each one of us, did not 
begin with this life, but were brought into life by 
us from a past that is concealed from us by our 
birth in the flesh ; moreover, we see that the whole 
course of our life here is nothing but a never 
ceasing augmentation of our love, which will never 
come to an end, but which will only be veiled from 
our eyes by the death of the flesh. 

Our visible life appears to me like a section of a 
cone, the apex and base of which are concealed 

249 



250 LIFE < 

from my mental vision. The narrowest portion of 
the cone represents my relation to the world, from 
which I first recognize myself ; the widest part is 
that higher relation to life, to which I have now 
attained. The beginning of this cone, its apex, 
is concealed from me in the time of my birth, the 
continuation of the cone is hidden from me, both 
in my corporeal existence and in my death in the 
flesh. I see neither the apex of the cone, nor its 
base : but I recognize its nature without any doubt 
from that part of it in which my visible life, as it 
comes within my recollection, passes. It seems 
to me at first that this section of a cone is the whole 
of my life ; but in proportion to the movement 
of my true life, I see on one hand that what 
constitutes the foundation of my life lies behind 
it, outside of its bounds ; according to the meas- 
ure of my life I feel more clearly and vividly my 
bond with my past which is invisible to me. 

On the other hand, I see how this foundation 
rests upon my invisible future. I feel more clearly 
and vividly my bond with the future, and I come to 
the conclusion that the life which is visible to me, 
my earthly life, is but a small portion of my whole 
life, from both its ends — before birth and after 



THE VISIBLE LIFE. 25 1 

I 

death — undoubtedly existing, but concealed from 
my present knowledge. And therefore, the cessa- 
tion of the visibility of life, after the death of the 
flesh, as well as its invisibility before my birth, 
does not deprive me of the indubitable knowledge 
of its existence before birth and after death. I 
enter life with certain ready-prepared qualities of 
love for the world outside of me ; my corporeal 
existence, short or long, passes in an augmentation 
of this love, which I brought into life, and hence I 
conclude, without any doubt, that I lived before 
my birth, and that I shall live not only after my 
momentary present life, in which I find myself at 
present as I meditate, but after every other mo- 
mentary time, either before or after my corporeal 
death, as well. 

Looking outside of myself at corporeal begin- 
nings and endings of the existence of other people 
(even of beings in general), I perceive that one 
life seems longer, another shorter; one makes its 
appearance earlier, and continues to be visible to 
me for a longer time ; another makes its appear- 
ance later, and is concealed from me again very 
quickly ; but I see in all the revelation of one and 
the same law ; for every true life, — an increase of 



252 LIFE. 

love, — like the broadening out of the rays of life. 

Sooner or later the curtain falls, concealing 
from me the temporary course of the life of men, 
but the life of all men is one and the same, and, 
like every life, it has no beginning and no end. 
And the fact that a man has lived for a longer or 
a shorter time in the conditions of this existence 
which are visible to me cannot present any differ- 
ence of the whole in the true life. 

The fact that one man has taken longer to pass 
across the field which is open to my vision, or that 
another has passed quickly across it, can by no 
means cause me to ascribe more reality to the life 
of the first, or less to the second. I know beyond 
a doubt that if I have seen a man pass my win- 
dow, whether fast or slowly, it makes no differ- 
ence. I know without a doubt that the man 
existed before the time when I saw him, and that 
he will continue to exist even when he has disap- 
peared from my sight. 

But why do some pass quickly, and others 
slowly ? Why does the old man, dried up and 
morally hardened, incapable, according to our view, 
of fulfilling the law of life — the increase in love 
— live on, while a child, a young man, a maiden, a 



THE VISIBLE LIFE. 253 

man in the full strength of his spiritual life, dies, 
passes beyond the bounds of this fleshly life, when, 
according to our ideas of the matter, he has only 
just begun to establish in himself a just relation 
to life. 

The deaths of Pascal and Gogol are comprehen- 
sible ; but how about Chevrier, Lermontoff, and 
thousands of other men, who, as it seems to us, 
had but just begun their inner labor, which might 
have been, as it seems, completed here ? 

But this only seems so to us. None of us knows 
anything about the foundations of life which are 
brought into the world by another, and of that 
movement of life which has taken place in him ; 
of those obstacles to the movement of life which 
exist in that being; and, chief of all, of those other 
conditions of life, possible, but unseen by us, in 
which, in another existence, the life of that man 
might be placed. 

It seems to us, as we look at the blacksmith's 
work, that the horseshoe is completely ready, — 
that it needs only a couple of blows, — but he 
breaks it, and throws it into the fire again, know- 
ing that it is not thoroughly smelted. 

We cannot know whether the work of the true 



254 LIFE - 

life is accomplished in a man or not. We only 
know this so far as we ourselves are concerned. 
It seems to us that a man dies when it is not 
necessary, but this cannot be so. A man dies 
only when it is indispensable for his happiness, just 
as a man grows up and attains to manhood only 
when that is necessary for his happiness. 

And in fact, if by life we mean life and not its 
semblance, if true life is the foundation of every- 
thing, its foundation may depend upon what it 
produces : — the cause cannot depend upon or 
proceed from the result, — the course of true life 
cannot be destroyed by a change in its mani- 
festation. The movement, begun but not com- 
pleted, of the life of man towards that world, 
cannot be suspended because he has an abscess, or 
because bacteria attack him, or because some one 
shoots him with a pistol. 

Man dies only because the happiness of his true 
life cannot be enhanced, in this world, and not 
because his lungs pain him, or because he has a 
cancer, or because a bomb has been thrown at 
him. It generally appears to us that to live a life 
in the flesh is natural, and that it is not natural to 
perish by fire, water, cold, lightning, sickness, a 



THE VISIBLE LIFE. 255 

pistol, a bomb ; — tut it is only necessary to re- 
flect seriously, looking from one side upon the life 
of men, in order to perceive that, on the contrary, 
it is quite unnatural for a man to live a corporeal 
life in the midst of these deadly conditions, in the 
midst of the wide-spread and, for the most part, 
deadly, and innumerable bacteria. 

And therefore, the corporeal existence, in the 
midst of all these destructive conditions, is, on 
the contrary, something of the most unnatural 
sort, in the sense of the materialists. If we are 
alive, it is not in the least because we support 
ourselves, but because we fulfil the business of 
life. The work of life comes to a close, and noth- 
ing can arrest the never-ceasing destruction of the 
animal life of man, — this destruction is accom- 
plished, and one of the most intimate causes, 
which always accompany the life of man, the 
death of the flesh, seems to us its exclusive cause. 

Our true life exists ; we know it alone ; from it 
alone we know the living life, and therefore, if its 
semblance be subjected to immutable laws, then 
why should not that which this semblance per- 
forms, be subject to laws also ? 

But we are troubled because we do not see the 



256 LIFE, 

cause and action in external manifestations : we do 
not know why one person enters life with such 
and such properties of his ego, and another person 
with others, why the life of one is broken off, and 
another continues. We ask ourselves : what, be- 
fore my existence, were the causes of my being 
born such as I am ? And what will be the result 
after my death, of my living thus or in some other 
way ? And we complain because we receive no 
answers to our questions. 

But to complain because I cannot understand 
now much that happened before my life and that 
will take place after my death, is the same as 
complaining because I cannot see what is beyond 
the limits of my vision. 

For if I saw what is beyond the limits of my 
vision, I should not see what is within its bounds. 
But, for the happiness of my animal, I must see 
all that goes on around me. 

And it is the same with the mind, by means of 
which I know. If I were able to see what is 
beyond the range of my intellect, I should not see 
what is within its range. But for the happiness 
of my true life, it is necessary to know all that 
to which I must submit then and now my animal 



THE VISIBLE LIFE. 



257 



person, in order to attain the happiness of life. 
And my mind reveals to me in this life that sole 
path along which I do not perceive a cessation of 
my happiness. 

It demonstrates to me indubitably that this life 
did not begin with birth, but that happiness 
always exists, — it demonstrates that this happi- 
ness of life grows and increases here, reaching 
such an extent that it cannot be contained, and 
only then does it pass beyond my conditions, 
which restrict its. augmentation, and pass into 
another existence. 

* Reason sets a man upon that sole path of life, 
which, like a cone-shaped, widening tunnel, en- 
closed in the centre on all sides by its close walls, 
opens to him afar off the indubitable immortality 
of life and its happiness. 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

THE INEXPLICABILITY OF THE SUFFERINGS OF THE 
EARTHLY EXISTENCE PROVES TO MAN, MORE CON- 
VINCINGLY THAN ANYTHING ELSE, THAT HIS LIFE 
IS NOT A LIFE OF PERSONALITY, WHICH BEGAN AT 
HIS BIRTH AND WHICH ENDS AT HIS DEATH. 

But even if a man could not help fearing death, 
or thinking of it, the sufferings alone, fearful, 
aimless, — utterly unjustifiable, irreparable suffer- 
ings to which he is subject, would be sufficient to 
destroy every rational idea ascribed to life. 

I am engaged in a work for others which is un- 
doubtedly good, and all of a sudden I am seized 
with an illness, which interrupts my undertaking 
and exhausts and tortures me, without sense or 
reason. A screw has grown rusty on the rails, 
and it must needs be that on that very day when 
it flies out, in the very train and carriage, a good 
woman should be travelling — a mother, and it 
must needs be that her children should be crushed 
before her very eyes. In an earthquake, precisely 

258 



MAN'S LIFE NOT ONE OF PERSONALITY. 259 

that spot sinks on which stands Lisbon or Vyerny, 
and perfectly innocent people plunge headlong, 
alive, into the earth, and die in terrible agony. 
What sense is there in this ? Why did this hap- 
pen to these people, and why thousands of other 
senseless, frightful cases of suffering, which as- 
tound men ? 

The explanations of reason make nothing clear. 
Such explanations always dodge the actual ques- 
tion, and only prove the more conclusively its 
insolubility. I have fallen ill because some mi- 
crobes or other have flown to me ; or the children 
were crushed before their mother's eyes in the 
train because the dampness had acted in such and 
such a way on the iron ; or Vyerny sank because 
of the existence of certain geological laws. But 
the real question is, why just these particular 
people were subjected to such terrible suffer- 
ings, and how I am to avoid such occasions of 
suffering ? 

To this there is no answer. Reflection, on the 
contrary, plainly demonstrates to me that there 
are no laws according to which one man is subject, 
but another man is not subject to these accidents, 
that there is an incalculable quantity of such acci- 



260 LIFE. 

dents, and that therefore, whatever I do, my life is 
liable every second to all the innumerable chances 
of the most terrible suffering. 

For if people drew only those deductions which 
inevitably follow from their view of the world, 
people who understand their life as a personal ex- 
istence would not remain alive for a minute. Cer- 
tainly, not a single laborer would live under a 
master who, on hiring the laborer, should stipulate 
for the right, on every occasion when he should 
see fit, to roast the laborer alive on a slow fire, or 
to flay him alive, or to pull out his sinews, and to 
commit all those horrors in general which he per- 
petrates upon his laborers, in the presence of the 
man hiring himself, without cause or explana- 
tion. 

If people really did understand life thoroughly, 
as they say that they do, not one of them would 
remain alive in this world, from pure fear of all 
those torturing and utterly inexplicable sufferings 
which they see around them, and into which they 
might fall at any second. 

But people, in spite of the fact that they are all 
acquainted with the various easy ways of killing 
themselves, of escaping from this life filled with 



MAN'S LIFE NOT ONE OF PERSONALITY 2 6l 

h 

such harsh and inconceivable sufferings, — people 
live on ; they complain, they weep over the suffer- 
ings, and go on living. 

It is impossible to say that this arises from the 
fact that there is more pleasure than suffering in 
this life, because, in the first place, not only has 
simple reflection shown, but philosophical investi- 
gations have also demonstrated, that all earthly 
life is a series of sufferings, which is far from be- 
ing redeemed by its enjoyments; in the second 
place, we all know, both from ourselves and from 
others, that people in positions which present 
nothing but a series of increasing sufferings, with- 
out any possibility of alleviation except by death 
itself, do not, nevertheless, kill themselves, but 
cling to life. 

There is but one explanation of this strange 
contradiction : men all know, in the depths of 
their own soul, that all sorts of sufferings are al- 
ways indispensable to the happiness of their lives, 
and they only go on living foreseeing them or sub- 
mitting to them. But they rebel against suffer- 
ing because, with their false view of life, which 
demands happiness only for their personality, the 
interference with this happiness, which does not 



262 LIFE. 

lead to evident happiness, must appear as 
something inconceivable, and therefore disturb- 
ing. 

And people take fright before suffering, they are 
amazed at it, as though at some utterly unexpected 
and incomprehensible thing. But, at the same time, 
man is reared on sufferings, his whole life is a 
series of sufferings undergone by him and im- 
posed by him on other beings, and it would seem 
as though it were time for him to have become ac- 
customed to suffering, and not to quail before it, 
and not to ask himself why and to what end his 
sufferings. Every man, if he will but reflect, will 
see that all his enjoyments are purchased by the 
sufferings of other beings, that all his sufferings 
are indispensable for his enjoyment, that without 
suffering there is no enjoyment, that suffering and 
enjoyment are two contrary states, one being 
evoked by the other, and each indispensable to 
the other. 

Then what mean the questions, "Why?" — 
" To what end is suffering ? " which the reasoning 
man puts to himself ? Why does a man, who 
knows that suffering is bound up with enjoyment, 
ask himself, " Why ? " — " To what end is suffer- 



MAN'S LIFE NOT ONE OF PERSONALITY. 263 

ing ? " while he does not ask himself, " Why ? " 
— " To what end are enjoyments ? " 

All life of the animal, and of man as an animal, 
is an unbroken chain of sufferings. All the ac- 
tivity of the animal, and of man as an animal, calls 
forth only suffering. Suffering is a painful sensa- 
tion which calls forth activity, which banishes this 
painful sensation and calls forth a state of pleasure. 
And the life of the animal, and of man as an ani- 
mal, is not only not suspended by suffering, but is 
perfected only by suffering. Suffering, therefore, 
is that which moves life, and hence it is what it 
should be;. then what does man ask about when 
he asks : " Why and to what end is suffering ? " 

The animal does not ask this. 

When the perch, in consequence of hunger, tor- 
ments the dace, when the spider tortures the fly, 
the wolf, the sheep, they know that they are doing 
what must be, and that they are accomplishing 
the very thing which must be fulfilled ; and there- 
fore, when the perch and the spider and the wolf 
fall into the same torments from those stronger 
than they, they know, as they flee, and resist and 
wrench themselves away, that they are doing what 
must be done, and therefore there cannot be the 



264 LIFE - 

slightest doubt in them that what is happening to 
them is precisely that which must be so. 

But a man, occupied only with the healing of 
his legs when they have been torn off on the 
battlefield, upon which he has torn off the legs of 
others, or occupied only in passing his time as 
comfortably as possible in a solitary cell in jail, 
after having directly or indirectly consigned oth- 
ers to that place, or a man who cares only for 
fighting himself free and fleeing from the wolves, 
who are rending him, after having himself slain 
thousands of animals and eaten them, — a man 
cannot regard what happens to him as what must 
be, because, in submitting to these sufferings, he 
did not do all that he should have clone, and, 
therefore it seems to him that something is hap- 
pening to him which should not be. 

But what should a man do, who has been torn 
by wolves, except flee and fight free from them ? 
— That which it is the proper place of a man as a 
rational being to do ; confess the sin which suffer- 
ing has caused, repent of it, and confess the truth. 

The animal suffers only in the present, and 
therefore the activity called forth by the suffering 
of the animal directed upon itself in the present 



MAN'S LIFE NOT ONE OF PERSONALITY. 265 

fully satisfies it. But man suffers not only in the 
present, but he suffers also in the past, and there- 
fore the activity called forth by the suffering of 
man, if concentrated only upon the present of the 
man's animal, cannot satisfy him. Only activity 
directed to the cause as well, and to the results of 
suffering, both upon the past and upon the future, 
satisfies the suffering man. 

The animal is locked in and tears himself from 
his cage, or his foot is sore and he licks the spot 
that pains him, or he devours another and rids 
himself of him. The law of his life is broken 
from within, and he concentrates his activity 
upon restoring it, and he fulfils that which must 
be. But a man — I myself or some one closely 
connected with me — is in prison, or I lose my 
legs, or some one nearly related to me loses his 
legs in battle, or wolves rend me : the activity 
devoted to flight from prison, to the healing of my 
legs, to fighting myself free from wolves, does not 
satisfy me, because confinement in prison, pain 
in my leg, and the being torn by wolves, consti- 
tute only a very small portion of my suffering. 

I perceive the cause of my suffering in the past, 
in my errors and in the errors of other people, and 



266 LIFE. 

if my activity is not directed to the cause of the 
suffering — to the errors, and if I do not try to 
free myself from it, I do not do that which should 
be done, and therefore suffering presents itself to 
me in a way in which it should not, and not only 
in fact but in imagination does it grow to frightful 
proportions, which exclude all possibility of life. 

The cause of suffering for the animal is the 
violation of the law of animal life ; this violation 
makes itself known by a consciousness of pain, 
and the activity called forth by the violation of 
the law is directed to the removal of the pain; 
the cause of pain for rational consciousness, is the 
violation of the law of life of rational conscious- 
ness ; this violation reveals itself in a conscious- 
ness of error, of sin, and the activity called forth 
by the violation of the law is directed to the re- 
moval of the error — the sin. And as the suffer- 
ing of the animal calls forth activity directed to 
pain, and this activity deprives suffering of its tor- 
ture, so the sufferings of a rational being call 
forth activity directed to error, and this activity 
frees suffering from its acuteness. 

The questions, "Why?" and, "To what pur- 
pose?" which make their way into the soul of 



MAN'S LIFE NOT ONE OF PERSONALITY. 267 

man, on the experience of the imagination of suf- 
fering, only show that man has not recognized 
that activity which should be called forth in him 
by suffering, and which frees suffering from its 
torture. And in fact, for the man who recognizes 
his life as lying in his animal existence, there can 
be none of that activity which frees from suffer- 
ing, and the less so as he already understands 
his life. 

When a man, who recognizes personal existence 
as his life, finds the cause of his personal suffering 
in his personal errors, he understands that he has 
fallen ill because he has eaten something injuri- 
ous, or that he has been beaten because he him- 
self went out to fight, or that he is hungry and 
naked because he would not work, — he will know 
that he suffers because he has done that which he 
should not have done, and in order that he may 
do so no more, and that, directing his activity to 
the extinction of error, he shall not rebel against 
suffering, but bear it lightly, and often joyously. 

But when suffering attacks such a man, exceed- 
ing the bounds of the bond of suffering and error 
which are visible to him, when he suffers from 
causes which have always existed in his own per- 



268 LIFE - 

sonal activity, or when the results of his suffering 
can be in no way advantageous either to himself 
or to any other person, it seems to him that he 
is overtaken by that which should not be, and he 
asks himself : Why ? to what purpose ? and, find- 
ing no object upon which to direct his activity, he 
rebels against suffering and his suffering is con- 
verted into terrible torture. But the greater part 
of man's suffering is always such that its causes 
or its consequences — sometimes the one, and 
sometimes the other — are concealed from him in 
space and time ; hereditary diseases, unhappy 
accidents, bad harvests, collisions, conflagrations, 
earthquakes, and so on, which end in death. 

The declaration that this is necessary in order to 
furnish a lesson for the people of the future, that 
they must not yield to those passions which are 
reflected in the diseases of their descendants, or 
that they must build trains better, or handle fire 
with more caution, — all these explanations give 
me no answer at all. I cannot admit that my life 
lies in the illustration of the oversights of other 
people ; my life is my life, with my aspirations for 
happiness, and not an illustration for other lives. 
And these explanations are fit only for the purpose 



MAN'S LIFE NOT ONE OF PERSONALITY. 2 6g 

of discussion, and do not alleviate that fear in the 
presence of the senselessness of the suffering 
which threatens me, and which excludes all possi- 
bility of life. 

But if it were even possible to understand in 
any way that, while causing other people to suffer 
through my errors, I myself bear the sufferings of 
others ; if it were possible to understand even 
remotely that every suffering is a punishment for 
an error which must be rectified by men in this 
life, there still remains a long series of sufferings 
which are in no way explicable. 

Wolves rend a man who is alone in the forest, 
a man is drowned, frozen, or burned up, or simply 
falls ill alone and dies, and no One ever knows how 
he suffered, and there are thousands of such cases. 
Of what use can this be to any one ? 

For the man who understands his life as an 
animal existence, there is not, and there cannot 
be, any explanation, because, for such a man, the 
bond between suffering and error lies only in the 
manifestations which are visible to him, and this 
bond is utterly lost from his mental vision in the 
sufferings which precede death. 

A man has two alternatives of choice : either, 



2/0 LIFE. 

not recognizing the connection between the suffer- 
ings which he has experienced and his life, to con- 
tinue to endure the greater part of his sufferings 
as tortures, utterly devoid of reason, or to admit 
that my errors and deeds committed in conse- 
quence of them — that my sins, whatever they 
may be — are the cause of my sufferings, and that 
my sufferings are a release and redemption for my 
sins and the sins of other people, whatever may 
be their nature. 

Only these two attitudes towards suffering are 
possible : one, according to which suffering is that 
which should not exist, because I do not perceive 
its external significance, and the other that it is 
just what it should be, because I know its inward 
significance for my true life. The first proceeds 
from recognizing my separate, individual life, as 
the happiness of all happiness. The second pro- 
ceeds from the recognition of the bliss of my 
whole past and future life, as lying in its unbroken 
connection with the happiness of other men and 
creatures. 

According to the first view, there is no explana- 
tion for sufferings, and they call forth no other 
activity than a constantly increasing despair and 



MAN'S LIFE NOT ONE OF PERSONALITY. 2 *]l 

bitterness, which are not to be alleviated. Ac 
cording to the second, suffering evokes that same 
activity which constitutes the movement of true 
life, — a consciousness of sin, a release from error, 
and submission to the law of reason. 

If it is not man's reason, then it is the torture 
of suffering which forces him, willingly or unwill- 
ingly, to confess that his life is not placed in his 
personality, that this personality is only the visi- 
ble part of his whole life, that the external bond 
between cause and effect, visible to him in his 
personality, does not coincide with that internal 
bond of cause and effect, which is always known to 
man through his rational consciousness. 

The bond of error and suffering, visible to the 
animal only under conditions of time and space, is 
always clear to a man, outside of those conditions 
in his consciousness. Suffering of any sort, man 
always recognizes as the result of his sin, what- 
ever it may have been, and repentance for his sins 
as a release from suffering and the attainment of 
happiness. 

A man's whole life, from the first day of his 

childhood, consists in this alone : in the acknowl- 

. edgment, through suffering, of sin, and in the 



nn'j LIFE. 

freeing himself from suffering. I know that I 
came into this life with a certain knowledge of the 
truth, and that the greater my error the greater 
have been my sufferings and the sufferings of 
others, — that the more I have freed myself from 
error, the less have been my sufferings, and the 
more happiness have I attained. And, there- 
fore, I know that the greater that knowledge of 
the truth which I carry out of this world, and 
which is given me by my sufferings, even by my 
last sufferings which precede death, the greater is 
the happiness that I have attained. 

The torture of suffering is experienced only by 
the man who, having separated himself from the 
life of the world, and not perceiving those sins of 
his by which he brought his sufferings into the 
world, regards himself as an animal, and who, 
therefore, rebels against all those sufferings which 
he endures for the sins of the world. 

And, strange to say, that very thing which is 
clear to the reason, mentally, is confirmed in the 
sole and true activity of life, in love. Reason 
says that a man who confesses the connection of 
his sins and his sufferings with the sins and suffer- 
ings of the world frees himself from the torture of 
suffering; love indeed confirms this. 



MAN'S LIFE NOT ONE OF PERSONALITY. 2 Jl 

. The half of every man's life is passed in suffer- 
ing, which he not only does not recognize as tor- 
turing, and which he does not perceive, but which 
he regards as his happiness only because they are 
borne as the results of error, and as a means of 
alleviating the sufferings of beloved individuals. 
So that the less love there is, the more is man 
subjected to the anguish of suffering; the more 
love there is, the less acuteness of suffering is 
there ; but a thoroughly rational life, whose entire 
activity is manifested only in love, excludes the 
possibility of all suffering. The anguish of suffer- 
ing is only that pain which men experience on 
their attempt to break that chain of love to their 
ancestors, to their descendants, to their contem- 
poraries, which unites the life of a man with the 
life of the world. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

BODILY SUFFERINGS CONSTITUTE AN INDISPENSA- 
BLE CONDITION OF THE LIFE AND HAPPINESS 
OF MEN. 

" But, nevertheless, it is painful, it is oppres- 
sively painful. Why this pain ? " men ask. 

" Because this is not only necessary for us, 
but because we cannot live without its being 
painful to us," that man would answer us who 
has caused our pain, and has rendered it as little 
painful as possible, and has made as much happi- 
ness out of this "pain" as possible. 

For who does not know that the very first sen- 
sation in us of pain is the first and principal means 
of preserving our bodies, and for the prolongation 
of our animal life ? Bodily pain protects the ani- 
mal person. And while pain serves as a protec- 
tion to the person, as is the case with the child, 
pain cannot be that frightful torture, such as we 
know pain to be, at the times when we are in the 
full strength of our rational consciousness and 

274 



BODILY SUFFERINGS. 



275 



resist pain, seeing in it that which it should 
not be. 

Pain in the animal and the child is very well 
defined and small in size, never attaining that 
degree of anguish which it reaches in beings 
endowed with rational consciousness. In the 
case of the child, we see that he sometimes cries 
as pitifully from the bite of a flea as from the pain 
which destroys the internal organs. 

And the pain of a being which does not reason 
leaves no traces whatever in the memory. Let 
any man endeavor to recall his childish sufferings 
from pain, and he will see that he is incapable of 
even reconstructing them in his imagination. Our 
impression at the sight of the suffering of children 
and animals is our suffering more than theirs. 
The external expression of suffering in unreason- 
ing beings is immeasurably greater than the suffer- 
ing itself, and hence it evokes our sympathy in a 
far greater degree, as can be observed in diseases 
of the brain, in fevers, in typhus, in all sorts of 
agony. 

In those days when the rational consciousness 
has not yet been awakened, and pain serves only 
as a protection to the person, it is not acute ; in 



276 LIFE. 

that same period when there is in man a possibil- 
ity of rational consciousness, it is the means of 
subjugating the animal personality to the reason, 
and in proportion to the awakening of that con- 
sciousness does it become less and less acute. 

In reality, only when we find ourselves the 
complete master of our rational consciousness 
can we talk of sufferings, because only with 
this consciousness does lite begin, and that con- 
dition of it which we call suffering. In this 
condition the sensation of pain can rise to the 
greatest and descend to the most insignificant 
dimensions. Who, in fact, does not know, with- 
out studying physiology, that there is a limit to 
sensibility, that, when pain exceeds a certain 
point, sensibility either comes to an end in a 
swoon, insensibility, a fever, or that death super- 
venes ? Hence the augmentation of pain is a 
very accurately defined quantity, which cannot 
exceed certain bounds. But the sensation of pain 
can be infinitely augmented by our relations to it, 
.and in the same way it can be decreased to infi- 
nite minuteness. 

We all know how a man can, by submitting to 
pain, by acknowledging it as what must be, carry 



BODIL Y SUFFERINGS. 277 

it to insensibility, to a sensation of joy, even, in 
undergoing it. 

Not to mention the martyrs, not to- mention 
Huss, who sang in the fire at the stake, — sim- 
ple men, merely out of a desire to exhibit their 
courage, endure without a cry or a quiver what 
are considered the most torturing of operations. 
There are bounds to the augmentation of pain, to 
the diminution of sensation under it there is no 
limit. 

The anguish of pain is really frightful for peo- 
ple who consider their lives as lying in the exist- 
ence of the flesh. And how can it fail to be 
terrible to them when that force of reason be- 
stowed upon man for the annihilation of acute 
suffering is directed only to its augmenta- 
tion ? 

As Plato has a myth relating how God first 
fixed the period of man's existence at seventy 
years, but afterwards, on perceiving that men 
were the worse for it, altered it to what it now 
is, that is to say, arranged it so that men do not 
know the hour of their death, — just so surely 
would reason have decided what is, the myth nar- 
rating how men were first created without any 



278 LIFE. 

sensation of pain, but that afterwards it was 
arranged as it is for their happiness. 

If the gods had created men without the feeling 
of pain, men would very soon have begun to beg 
for it ; women lacking the pains of childbirth 
would have brought forth children under condi- 
tions where but few of them would have remained 
alive, children and young people would have 
spoiled their whole bodies, and grown people 
would never have known either the errors of 
those who had lived before them, and of people 
now living, nor, what is the most important of all, 
their own errors, — they would not have known 
what they must do in this life, they would have 
had no rational object of existence, they could 
never have reconciled themselves to the idea of 
impending death in the flesh, and they would have 
had no love. 

For a man who understands life as a submission 
of his personality to the law of reason, pain is not 
only not an evil, but is an indispensable condition 
both of his animal and his rational life. Were 
there no pain, his animal personality would have 
no indication when it had trangressed its laws : 
if rational consciousness suffered no pain, man 



BODILY SUFFERINGS. 



279 



would not know the truth, would not know his 
law. 

" But you talk," people retort to this, " about 
your personal sufferings, but how can you reject 
the sufferings of others ? The sight of these suf- 
ferings constitutes the most acute suffering," say 
people, not in full sincerity. 

The suffering of others ? But the sufferings 
of others — what you call sufferings — have not 
ceased and will not cease. The whole world of 
men and animals suffers and has never ceased to 
suffer. Is it possible that we have learned this 
only to-day ? Wounds, mutilations, cold, diseases, 
every sort of heart-rending accident, and, chief of 
all, the pains of birth, without which no one of us 
made his appearance in this world, — surely, all 
these are indispensable conditions of existence. 
Surely, this is the very thing the alleviation of 
which, the assistance of which forms the sub- 
stance of the rational life of men, — the very 
same thing upon which the true activity of life is 
directed. 

An understanding of the sufferings of person- 
ality added to men's errors, and activity directed 
towards their diminution, constitutes the whole 



280 LIFE. 

business of human life. That is just why I am 
a man, — an individual, — in order that I may- 
understand the sufferings of other individuals, 
and that is why I am a rational consciousness, 
in order that in the sufferings of every other 
separate individual I may see the general cause 
of suffering — error, and may eradicate it in my- 
self and in others. How can the material of his 
work be a cause of suffering to the workman ? It 
is the same as though a ploughman were to say 
that unploughed soil was his suffering. 

Unploughed land can be a source of suffering 
only for him who would like to see the field 
ploughed, but who does not consider it the busi- 
ness of his life to plough it. 

Activity directed to the immediate loving ser- 
vice of the suffering and to the diminution of the 
general cause of suffering — error — is the only 
joyful labor which lies before a man, and gives 
him that inalienable happiness in which his life 
consists. 

There is, for a man, but one suffering, and it is 
that suffering which makes a man, voluntarily or 
otherwise, give himself up to that life in which 
there is for him but one happiness. 



B ODIL Y SUFFERINGS. 2 8 1 

This suffering is the consciousness of the con- 
tradiction between my own sinfulness and all the' 
world, and not only the possibility but the obliga- 
tion of realizing, not by some one or other, but in 
my own person, the whole truth in my own life 
and in that of all the world. 

It is impossible to alleviate this suffering either 
by sharing the sins of the world, or by seeing 
one's own sin, or yet by ceasing to believe not 
only in the possibility, but also in the duty of any 
one else,- but in my own, to realize all truth in my 
life and in the life of the world. The first only 
augments my suffering, the second deprives me of 
the force of life. Only the consciousness and 
activity of true life alleviate this suffering, by an- 
nihilating the disproportion between individual life 
and its aim, as acknowledged by man. 

Voluntarily or otherwise, man must acknowl- 
edge that his life does not hedge in his person 
from birth to death, and that the object recognized 
by him is an object that can be attained, and that, 
in his striving towards it, in the acknowledgment 
of his greater and greater sinfulness, and in the 
greater and greater realization of all the truth in 
his life, and in the life of the world, consists, has 



282 LIFE, 

consisted, and always will consist, the business of 
his life, which is inseparable from the life of the 
whole world. 

If rational consciousness does not drive a man, 
with his will, or against it, to the only true path of 
life on which there are no obstacles, no evil, but 
only an indestructible, ever growing, never begin- 
ning, never ending happiness, then the suffering 
which flows from error as to the sense of his life 
will so drive him. 



CONCLUSION. 

The life of man is a striving after happiness, 
and that for which he strives is given to him. 

Evil in the form of death and suffering is visi- 
ble to man only when he takes the law of his 
corporeal, animal existence for the law of his 
life. Only when he, being a man, descends to 
the level of the animal, does he see death and 
suffering. Death and suffering breathe sighs 
upon him from all quarters, like bugbears, and 
drive him upon the one path of human life which 
is open to him, subservient to his law of reason, 
and expressing itself in love. Death and suffer- 
ing are only crimes committed by man against his 
law of life. For a man who lives according to his 
law, there is no death and no suffering. 

." Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest. 

" Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me ; for 
I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls. 

283 



284 



LIFE. 



" For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light." 
(Matt, xi.) 

The life of man is a striving towards good ; 
that towards which he strives is given to him ; 
life cannot be death, and good cannot be evil. 



APPENDIX I. 

People generally say : " We study life not from 
the consciousness of our own life, but outside of 
ourselves, in general." But this is the same as 
saying : " We look at an object not with our eyes, 
but outside of ourselves, in general." 

We behold the objects outside of ourselves 
because we see them in our eyes, and we know 
life outside of ourselves only because we know it 
in ourselves. And we see objects only as we see 
them in our eyes, and we define life outside of 
ourselves only as we know it in ourselves. But 
we know life in ourselves as a striving after good. 
And therefore, without a definition of life as a 
striving after good, it is impossible not only to 
observe, but even to see life. 

The first and principal act of our consciousness 
as living beings consists in our including many 
different objects in our conception of one living 
being, and this living being we exclude from 
every other. 

285 



286 LIFE. 

We know that a man on horseback is not a 
number of beings, and is not one being, not 
because we observe all the parts, constituting the 
man and the horse, but because neither in the 
head, nor in the legs, nor in the other parts of the 
man and the horse do we see that separate striv- 
ing after good which we know in ourselves. And 
we know that the man and the horse are not one, 
because we know in them two separate aspirations 
towards good, while in ourselves we know only 
one. 

Only from this do we know that there is life in 
the combination of horse and rider, because there 
is life in a drove of horses, that there is life in 
birds, in insects, in trees, in the grass. But if we 
did not know that the horse and the man each 
desired his own happiness, that each horse in the 
drove desired this separately, that such happiness 
is desired by every bird, beetle, insect, tree, and 
blade of grass, we should not perceive separate- 
ness in the being, and, not perceiving separate- 
ness, we could never have understood anything 
living ; and a regiment of cavalry, and a flock, and 
birds, and insects, and plants, — all would have 
been like waves in the sea, and all the world 



APPENDIX. 



287 



would melt together for us into one inseparable 
movement, in which we could not, by any possi- 
bility, find the secret of life. 

If I know that the horse and the dog and the 
tick that lives upon him are living beings, and if 
I can observe them, it is only because the horse 
and the dog and the tick have each their separate 
aims, — the aim of each being his own happiness. 
I know this because I know myself as an individ- 
ual striving after the same happiness. 

In this striving after happiness also lies the 
foundation of every knowledge of life. Without 
a confession that this striving after good, which 
man feels within himself, is life, and an image of 
all life, no study of life is possible, and no obser- 
vation of life is practicable. And hence, observa- 
tion begins when life is already known, and no 
observation upon the manifestations of life can (as 
it appears to scientific man) define life itself. 

Men do not recognize the definitions of life in 
the striving towards happiness which they find 
in their consciousness, but they recognize the 
possibility of the knowledge of this striving in 
the tick, and on the foundation of the suppositi- 
tious knowledge, founded upon nothing at all, of 



288 LIFE. 

this happiness towards which the tick is striving, 
they make observations and draw deductions 
even as to the very existence of life. 

My every conception as to external life is 
founded upon the knowledge of my striving to- 
wards happiness. And therefore, having merely 
confessed in what my happiness and my life con- 
sist, I shall be in a condition to recognize in what 
consist the happiness and life of other beings. 
But the happiness and life of other beings I 
cannot in any way know without having acknowl- 
edged my own. 

Observations upon other beings, striving to- 
wards their aims, which are unknown to me, 
constituting semblances of that happiness the 
striving after which I know in myself, not only 
can explain nothing to me, but can certainly 
hide from me my true knowledge of life. 

For to study life in other beings which have not 
definitions of their life is the same as describing a 
surrounding district without having got its centre. 
Only after having fixed upon an immovable point 
as a centre can the region be described. But, 
whatever figures we might draw, without a centre 
there will be no surrounding district. 



APPENDIX II. 

False science studying the manifestations which 
accompany life, and assuming to study life itself, 
by this assumption distorts the idea of life, and 
hence, the more it studies the manifestations of 
that which it calls life, the further it gets from the 
idea of life, which it wishes to study. 

At first mammals are studied, then the other 
creatures, vertebrates, fishes, plants, corals, cells, 
microscopic organisms, and the matter is carried 
to such a point that the distinction between liv- 
ing and non-living, between the bounds of organ- 
ism and of non-orgariism, between the bounds of 
one organism and another, are lost. 

It is carried to such a point that what cannot 
be observed seems to be the most important sub- 
ject of investigation and observation. The secret 
of life and the explanation of everything seems to 
lie in comma-shaped and other bacilli, which are 
not visible, but which are rather assumed, which 
289 



290 LIFE. 

are discovered to-day and forgotten to-morrow. 
The explanation of everything is assumed in those 
beings which are contained in microscopic beings, 
and those which are also contained in even these, 
and so forth, to infinity, as though infinite activ- 
ity of the little is not the same as infinite activity 
of the great. 

The mystery will be revealed when all the infin- 
ity of the small shall have been investigated to 
the end, that is to say, never. , And men do not 
see this — that the idea that the question will 
attain solution in the infinitely small is an indu- 
bitable proof that the question is wrongly stated. 
And this, -the last stage of folly — that which 
clearly demonstrates the utter loss of sense in 
the investigation, — this stage is regarded as a 
triumph of science ; the last degree of blindness 
appears the highest degree of vision. Men have 
come to their wits' end, and have thereby clearly 
proved to themselves the falsity of that path along 
which they have been journeying ; and there are 
no limits to their rapture. If we can only increase 
the power of the microscope a little more, we 
shall understand the conversion of the inorganic 
into the organic, and of the organic into the 



APPENDIX. 291 

psychic, and the whole mystery of life will be laid 
open to us. 

Men who study shadows instead of objects have 
entirely forgotten the -object which they were 
studying, and, plunging deeper and deeper into the 
shadows, they have reached utter darkness, and 
rejoice because the shadow is so dense. 

The meaning of life is revealed in the conscious- 
ness of man as a striving after good. The eluci- 
dation of this good, the more complete definition 
of it, constitutes the chief aim and work of the 
life of all mankind, and because this labor is diffi- 
cult, that is to say, not a plaything but toil, men 
come to the conclusion that the definition of this 
good (or happiness) cannot be found in that place 
where it is situated, that is to say, in the rational 
consciousness of man, and that, therefore, it is 
necessary to seek it everywhere, — except where 
it is indicated. 

This is something of the sort that a man would 
do, who had been given an accurate list of all that 
he required, and who, not knowing how to read it, 
should fling aside the list, and inquire of every one 
whom he met whether they did not know what he 
needed ; for men seek everywhere, except in the 



292 LIFE. 

consciousness of man itself, for the definition of 
life, which is inscribed in the soul of man in in- 
effaceable letters, in his aspiration for happiness. 
This is all the more strange because all mankind, 
in the persons of its wisest representatives, begin- 
ning with the Greek saying which runs, " Know 
thyself," has uttered it, and continues to utter 
it in precisely the opposite sense. All religious 
teachings are nothing else than a definition of life 
as a striving towards that active happiness which 
is accessible to man, and which cannot lead astray. 



APPENDIX III. 

Ever more and more clearly does the voice of 
reason become audible to man ; ever more and 
more frequently does man lend an ear to this 
voice ; and the time will come, and has already 
come, when this voice has grown stronger than 
the voice summoning to personal happiness, and 
to delusive duty. 

On the one hand, it becomes ever clearer that 
the life of personality, with its enticements, can- 
not be happiness ; on the other hand, that the 
payment of every debt prescribed by men is only 
a deceit, which deprives man of the possibility of 
settling the only debt of man, — that rational and 
honorable origin from which he proceeds. That 
recent delusion which demands a belief in the idea 
that we have no rational explanation has already 
been worn out, and it is impossible to return to it. 

Formerly, men said : " Do not think, but believe 
in the duty which we prescribe. Reason will de- 
293 



294 LIFE. 

ceive you ; faith alone will open to you the true 
happiness of life." And man tried to believe, and 
did believe ; but his relations to people proved to 
him that other men believed in something entirely 
different, and asserted that this other something 
gave greater happiness to man. The decision of 
the question has become inevitable, as to which 
faith — out of many — is the more true; but rea- 
son alone can decide this. 

Man will always know all things through his 
reason, and not through faith. It might be possi- 
ble to deceive by affirming that he will know all 
things through faith ; but as soon as man knows 
two faiths, and sees men confessing another faith, 
just as he does his own, he is placed under the 
inevitable necessity of deciding the matter by his 
reason. A Buddhist, on becoming acquainted 
with Mahometanism, if he remains a Buddhist, 
will remain a Buddhist by faith no longer, but by 
reason. As soon as another faith has been pre- 
sented to him, and the question as to whether he 
is to abandon his own faith, or the one offered 
him, — that question is inevitably settled by the 
reason. And if, on becoming acquainted with 
Mahometanism, he has remained a Buddhist, his 



APPENDIX. 295 

•t 

former blind faith in Buddhism is now infallibly 
founded on a basis of reason. 

Attempts in our day to instil spiritual matters 
into man by faith, while ignoring his reason, are 
precisely the same as attempts to feed a man and 
ignore his mouth. 

Man's common nature has proved to them that 
they all have a common foundation of knowledge, 
and men can never more return to their former 
errors ; and the time is coming, and is even now 
come, when the dead shall hear the voice of the 
Son of God, and, hearing, shall be made alive. 

It is impossible to drown that voice, because 
that voice is not the single voice of any one per- 
son, but the voice of all the rational consciousness 
of mankind, which is expressed in every separate 
man, and in the best men of mankind, and now 
already in the majority of men. 



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